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This article argues that Wordsworth's "Laodamia" demonstrates the shaping influence exercised by Virgil's Aeneid over the English poet's creative imagination. In its focus on the title character's devoted but ultimately self-destroying love for her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy, "Laodamia" treats a theme that had long preoccupied Wordsworth as both a poet and a reader of Virgil. Wordsworth constructs his narrative around an allusive counterpoint with the Aeneid, echoing the distinctive stylistic patterns of Virgil's Latin while modifying, combining, and rearranging details from the epic's plot, particularly its two major episodes of doomed female love: Andromache's hopeless mourning at the tomb of Hector in book 3 and Dido's self-consuming passion for Aeneas in book 4. In the depth and the variety of its relationships with the Aeneid, "Laodamia" constitutes one of the most multifaceted examples in literary history of an English poet's creative engagement with the classical inheritance.
This article argues that Wordsworth's "Laodamia" demonstrates the shaping influence exercised by Virgil's Aeneid over the English poet's creative imagination. In its focus on the title character's devoted but ultimately self-destroying love for her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy, "Laodamia" treats a theme that had long preoccupied Wordsworth as both a poet and a reader of Virgil. Wordsworth constructs his narrative around an allusive counterpoint with the Aeneid, echoing the distinctive stylistic patterns of Virgil's Latin while modifying, combining, and rearranging details from the epic's plot, particularly its two major episodes of doomed female love: Andromache's hopeless mourning at the tomb of Hector in book 3 and Dido's self-consuming passion for Aeneas in book 4. In the depth and the variety of its relationships with the Aeneid, "Laodamia" constitutes one of the most multifaceted examples in literary history of an English poet's creative engagement with the classical inheritance.
As Willard Spiegelman observed forty years ago, readers "have long felt the temperamental affinities of [William] Wordsworth with Virgil, his similar appreciation of a universal sorrow which touches and colors all mortal affairs."1 These affinities led the English poet to undertake two extended translations from his Latin predecessor over the course of his career. In 1788-89, while still a student at Cambridge, he translated and paraphrased sections scattered through all four books of Virgil's Georgics; in 1823-24, he rendered into English the first three books of the Aeneid in their entirety (as well as passages from books 4 and 8).2 Wordsworth's familiarity with Virgil encompassed not only the Latin originals but an array of other English translations from which he freely borrowed in his efforts, including at least four different versions of each poem.3 Bruce E. Graver has demonstrated that Wordsworth's own translations show an intimate familiarity with the nuances of Virgil's lines, whose effects he seeks to approximate in English through the use of a deliberately Latinate vocabulary, word order, and versification.4 Other scholars have traced the significance of this immersion in Virgil's works for a number of Wordsworth's most important original poems, arguing that "Michael" responds to the Georgics in its treatment of rural labor5 and that the "Immortality Ode" draws on Virgil's evocation of childhood and his vision of human regeneration in Eclogue 4.6 A wide range of Virgilian influences has also been detected throughout The Prelude.7
However, Wordsworth's most imaginatively layered response to Virgil occurs neither within the unfinished translations nor in any of the more celebrated original poems but in a work poised halfway between the two, one that evokes the cadences and motifs of the Aeneid while transmuting them to suit its own creative purposes. Wordsworth composed his mythological narrative "Laodamia" in 1814, nine years before the partial Aeneid translation; after its initial publication in 1815, he revised the poem intermittently over the three decades that followed. "Laodamia" tells the tale of the title character's devoted but ultimately self-destroying love for her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy. When the gods allow Protesilaus to return from the dead for three hours in response to his wife's prayers, he counsels her to restrain her passion and follow his own example of self-denying virtue, manifested in his decision to sacrifice his life by leading the army ashore in spite of an oracle prophesying his death if he did so. But Laodamia is unable to obey her husband's warning and dies overwhelmed by grief when he vanishes again. Those few critics who have noted the Virgilian qualities of "Laodamia" have tended to focus either on its general tone and sensibility or on its specific allusions to the account of the underworld in book 6 of the Aeneid. Harold Bloom, for instance, describes the poem's "Virgilian tenderness for a victim of what has become a hopeless passion" before singling out the two stanzas that recall Virgil's description of the Elysian Fields (ll. 97-108) as "the closest in English to the spirit and manner of Virgil, for they possess something of his troubled hope, gentle gravity, and elegiac intensity";8 while Carole Anne Taylor contends that Wordsworth's reworking of aspects of Aeneas's and Anchises's experiences in book 6 within the character of Protesilaus shows his "structural frustration in trying to transform an Epicurean hero . . . into a Stoic-Christian hero secure in an afterlife of appropriate rewards."9
But as I shall argue here, Wordsworth's reshaping of Virgilian materials in "Laodamia" is both more subtle and more pervasive than has previously been recognized, extending to style as well as substance and ranging far beyond the adaptation of elements from Aeneas's underworld journey in book 6. In its focus on the self-destroying effects of love and grief, "Laodamia" treats a theme that had long preoccupied Wordsworth as both a poet and a reader of Virgil. Graver points out that the most ambitious of Wordsworth's youthful translations from the Georgics is the episode describing Orpheus's grief for his dead wife (4.453-527), an account of "a bereft spouse who is destroyed both psychologically and physically by the intensity of his grief" that anticipates Wordsworth's use of the same topos in poems such as An Evening Walk, The Ruined Cottage, "The Mad Mother," "The Thorn," and "Ruth."10 In "Laodamia" these traces of implicit Virgilian influence deepen into a full-scale engagement with the classical poet, as Wordsworth constructs his narrative around an allusive counterpoint with Virgil's Aeneid. He echoes the distinctive stylistic patterns of Virgil's Latin while modifying, combining, and rearranging details from the epic's plot, particularly its two major episodes of doomed female love, Andromache's hopeless mourning at the tomb of Hector in book 3 and Dido's self-consuming passion for Aeneas in book 4. Wordsworth later recalled that the composition of "Laodamia" "cost me more trouble than almost anything of equal length I have ever written" and asserted that his aim in it had been to outdo his classical predecessors by giving the tale "a loftier tone than, so far as I know, has been given to it by any of the Ancients who have treated of it."11 The poem that resulted from these labors is one that offers the finest possible example of the shaping influence exercised by Virgil over his Romantic successor's creative imagination.
At the broadest thematic level, the parallels between the two poems stem from their narrative situations, as the story recounted in each shows the emotional toll of the Trojan War on a protagonist who lives on in grief after losing a spouse at the beginning of the war (in Laodamia's case) or its end (for Aeneas, whose wife Creusa dies in the Greeks' sack of the city). In addition, the two poems are similarly structured. Both begin in medias res by depicting episodes from the chronological middle of the stories-"Laodamia" with the wife's prayer for her husband's return from the dead; the Aeneid, with the storm provoked by Juno to wreck Aeneas's fleet during the journey from Troy to Italy. Each poem then follows this opening with a speech uttered by a hero of the Trojan War describing events from the conflict itself, as Protesilaus tells Laodamia of his death at Hector's hands and Aeneas in book 2 relates to Dido his experience of Troy's destruction. These symmetries in the overarching narratives are reinforced by an explicit connection that Wordsworth himself drew between the two poems: in a note to "Laodamia," he cites Aeneid 6.447- 48 (alongside passages from Pliny and Euripides) as a source for his story, observing that "Virgil places the Shade of Laodamia in a mournful region, among unhappy Lovers."12 The lines that he quotes occur within Aeneas's journey through the underworld, where the hero encounters Laodamia in the Fields of Mourning among a throng of classical women destroyed by love, including Phaedra and Procris, Evadne and Pasiphaë. Here, "quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit, / secreti celant calles et myrtea circum / silva tegit; curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt. / . . . his Laodamia / it comes" (those whom stern Love has consumed with cruel wasting are hidden in walks withdrawn, embowered in a myrtle grove; even in death the pangs leave them not. . . . With them goes Laodamia) (6.442- 48).13
Virgil's reference to Laodamia comprises a mere three words, but Wordsworth would make much of the relationship between his text and the Aeneid that it established on two separate occasions following the poem's initial publication in 1815. First, in an 1824 letter he responded to Walter Savage Landor's objection to the apparent Christian anachronism of Protesilaus's description of the afterlife as a "second birth" (l. 101) by asserting that "I certainly meant nothing more by it than the eadem cura, and the largior aether, etc., of Virgil's 6th Aeneid."14 And six years later, Wordsworth appealed to Virgilian authority once again, this time in support of his revisions to the stanza describing Laodamia's death. In the version that appeared in 1815, the poet had exhorted readers to "judge her gently who so deeply loved! / Her, who, in reason's spite, yet without crime, / Was in a trance of passion thus removed; / Delivered from the galling yoke of time / And these frail elements to gather flowers / Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers" (ll. 158- 63). But Wordsworth came to think this immediate transport to the Elysian Fields an inappropriately mild fate for his protagonist given her failure of self-control, and so he altered the stanza repeatedly over the thirty years that followed in order to reflect his own shifting sense of what justice required. I will be discussing the content of this sequence of revisions later in this essay; the relevant point here is that in the midst of his work on them, in 1830, Wordsworth wrote to his son John explaining the changes by reference to Virgil's placement of Laodamia within the underworld:
As first written the Heroine was dismissed to happiness in Elysium. To what purpose then the mission of Protesilaus-He exhorts her to moderate her passion-the exhortation is fruitless-and no punishment follows. So it stood; at present she is placed among unhappy Ghosts, for disregard of the exhortation. Virgil also places her there.15
Wordsworth thus invoked Laodamia's brief appearance in the Aeneid among the "unhappy Ghosts," tormented by love even in death, at least three times in order to explain the inspiration behind the writing and revising of "Laodamia."
Apart from Wordsworth's own remarks, the most direct evidence for the relationship between the two poems comes from the series of phrases and images in "Laodamia" that allude to passages in the Aeneid. For instance, the famous statement of Aeneas in book 1 as he gazes on the scenes from the Trojan War painted on the walls of Dido's temple, "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" (here, too, are tears for misfortune and human sorrows pierce the heart) (l. 462), is recast in the closing stanza of Wordsworth's poem, immediately after his much-revised account of Laodamia's death: "Yet tears to human suffering are due; / And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown / Are mourned by man, and not by man alone" (ll. 164- 66). As noted above, the bulk of these localized verbal parallels between "Laodamia" and the Aeneid derive from Aeneas's underworld journey in book 6. Most significantly, in a similarity that Wordsworth himself pointed out in his 1824 letter to Landor, Protesilaus's description of the afterlife that he attained through his act of self-sacrificing martial virtue at Troy (ll. 41-48, 109- 10, 123-26, and 133-38) mirrors Virgil's account of the Elysian Fields, a section of the underworld inhabited by categories of the virtuous that include those who suffered in battle for their country (6.660- 65). In the Aeneid Elysium is described as a place of magnified earthly beauty and joy, where "largior . . . campos aether et lumine vestit / purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt" (an ampler ether clothes the meads with roseate light, and they know their own sun, and stars of their own) and "quae gratia currum / armorumque fuit vivis, quae cura nitentis / pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos" (The same pride in chariot and arms that was theirs in life, the same care in keeping sleek steeds, attends them now that they are hidden beneath the earth) (6.640- 41 and 653-55). Closely following the contours of this Virgilian afterlife, Wordsworth in "Laodamia" envisions "a second birth / For all that is most perfect upon earth," containing "all that is most beauteous-imaged there / In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, / An ampler ether, a diviner air, / And fields invested with purpureal gleams; / Climes which the Sun, who sheds the brightest day / Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey" (ll. 101-8).
Elsewhere in Wordsworth's poem, briefer allusions to other specific passages from book 6 supplement the extended parallel in these two stanzas. The picture of Laodamia's agitation as she implores Jove to restore her dead husband to her-"Her countenance brightens,-and her eye expands, / Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows" (ll. 10-11)-deliberately evokes book 6's depiction of the Sibyl, Aeneas's guide through the underworld, as the god takes possession of her before she prophesies: "subito non vultus, non color unus, / non comp-tae mansere comae, sed pectus anhelum, / et rabie fera corda tument, maiorque videri" (suddenly not countenance nor colour was the same, nor stayed her tresses braided; but her bosom heaves, her heart swells with wild frenzy, and she is taller to behold) (6.47-49). And Laodamia's failed repeated attempts to embrace the "unsubstantial Form" of her husband when Hermes brings him to her in fulfillment of her request (ll. 25-30), as well as her inability to grasp him when he vanishes at the end of their meeting (l. 152), allude directly to Aeneas's thrice-failed embrace of his father Anchises's shade as they greet each other in the Elysian Fields (6.700-702) and his similar thrice-failed attempt to clasp his wife Creusa's ghost at the conclusion of their brief reunion during the sack of Troy (2.792-94); both encounters are described in the Aeneid with identical Latin lines that are in turn echoed by the phrasing of the two Wordsworth passages.16 Finally, the wording of Laodamia's opening prayer for her dead husband's return to life ("in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn, / Him of the infernal Gods have I desired: / Celestial pity I again implore;- / Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!" [ll. 3- 6]) mirrors that of Aeneas's prayer to the Sibyl for reunion with his dead father Anchises, in this case through his own entry into the world of the dead: "unum oro . . . / ire ad conspectum cari genitoris et ora / contingat; doceas iter et sacra ostia pandas. / . . . gnatique patrisque, / alma, precor, miserere" (One thing I pray . . . be it granted me to pass into my dear father's sight and presence; show the way and open the hallowed portals! . . . Pity both son and sire, I beseech you, gracious one) (6.106-17). Taken by themselves, these isolated verbal parallels between "Laodamia" and the Aeneid merely reinforce the reliance on Virgilian sources already suggested by Wordsworth's own comments about his poem. But when we look more closely at other aspects of "Laodamia," more subtle and implicit connections begin to emerge, ones that bear more directly on both the substance and the style of Wordsworth's treatment of his favorite theme of self-destroying grief.
Wordsworth's aim of emulating and surpassing his classical predecessor by giving the story "a loftier tone than . . . has been given to it by any of the Ancients who have treated of it" helps to explain the stylistic distinctiveness of "Laodamia" within the poet's larger body of work, a quality that readers have noted ever since the poem's publication. Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth in 1815 of its originality "with reference to your own manner," commenting that "You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation."17 This is because the poem's ultimate "derivation" is in fact from Virgil as mediated by Wordsworth. A comment by another critic also writing in 1815 helps to illuminate the nature of the similarity between the two poets. Leigh Hunt's praise in that year of "the simple, deep-felt, and calm yet passionate grandeur of the poem entitled Laodamia" is strikingly close to Wordsworth's own later characterization of Virgil's style, in one of a series of letters written in 1823-24 to Lord Lonsdale concerning the Aeneid translation, as "an inimitable mixture of the elaborately ornate, and the majestically plain & touching."18 In "Laodamia," Wordsworth sought to reproduce this "inimitable mixture" in English through his use of unusual juxtapositions in style, syntax, and diction. For instance, within Laodamia's lines greeting her husband's apparition-"Redundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair / As when their breath enriched Thessalian air" (ll. 59-60)- the grandeur of the uncharacteristically Miltonic phrasing in the first statement (the image of "redundant locks" echoes l. 568 of Samson Agonistes) is balanced against the delicate pathos created by the simplicity of diction in the second. A similar effect is achieved by the movement between resounding polysyllabic words and short, direct phrases in the description of Protesilaus's appearance ("In his deportment, shape, and mien, appeared / Elysian beauty-melancholy grace- / Brought from a pensive though a happy place" [ll. 94-96]) and in the admonition he addresses to his wife ("I counsel thee by fortitude to seek / Our blest re-union in the shades below. / The invisible world with thee hath sympathized; / Be thy affections raised and solemnized" [ll. 141- 44]). In the stanza containing Laodamia's plea to her husband, the tone shifts from "the majestically plain & touching" in the blunt emotion, simple dic17 Robert tion, and direct syntax of the plea itself within the first four lines to "the elaborately ornate" in the description of the gods' reaction, weighted down with mythological references:
"No Spectre greets me,-no vain Shadow this:
Come, blooming Hero, place thee by my side!
Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss
To me, this day, a second time thy bride!"
Jove frowned in heaven; the conscious Parcae threw
Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue.
(ll. 61-66)
Even the poem's most obvious divergence from Virgil's stylistic practice-its use of the ABABCC stanzaic form that Shakespeare had earlier employed for his own mythological tale Venus and Adonis-helps to distill this mixed Virgilian tone. Wordsworth later explained to Lord Lonsdale that he had translated the Aeneid into rhymed heroic couplets rather than the unrhymed blank verse that would have more closely imitated Virgil's unrhymed hexameters because in encountering ancient authors, modern readers needed "every possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns," including "Their religion, their warfare, their course of action & feeling."19 In "Laodamia," the sharply divided stanzaic form helps to capture in English the duality of Virgil's Latin, as the separation within each stanza between the more narrative first four lines (ABAB) and the more epigrammatic final couplet (CC) both mirrors and embodies the tonal contrast of grandeur with simplicity.
Another of Wordsworth's comments to Lord Lonsdale about his Aeneid translation helps to explain a particularly striking feature of "Laodamia," its unusual frequency of enjambment. In a January 1824 letter, Wordsworth noted that "I have run the Couplets freely into each other" because "This variety seems to me to be called for, if any thing of the movement of the Virgilian versification be transferable to our rhyme Poetry"; he further clarified in a letter the next month that "Pentameters, where the sense has a close, of some sort, at every two lines, may be rendered in regularly closed couplets; but Hexameters, (especially the Virgilian, that run the lines into each other for a great length) can not."20 This self-conscious poetic experimentation is anticipated a de19 Wordsworth, cade earlier in "Laodamia," where twenty-five of the twenty-eight stanzas contain at least one enjambed line, and the majority feature two, three, or even four lines out of six running "freely into each other"- including frequent enjambment between the first and second lines of the rhyming couplet which concludes each stanza. Moreover, many of the enjambments in "Laodamia" are emphatic divisions of nouns and verbs from the participles, adjectives, and prepositional and adjectival phrases modifying them, a construction that is particularly characteristic of the Virgilian hexameter: for instance, the thousands of Greeks who "were deprest / By doubt" (ll. 51-52) before Protesilaus ventured ashore at Troy; Laodamia's "sacrifice, before the rising morn / Performed" (ll. 1-2) and her "fervent love endowed / With faith" (ll. 7-8); the "wand / That calms all fear" (ll. 19-20) with which Hermes touches her; Protesilaus's admonition to her that "thou, though strong in love, art all too weak / In reason" (ll. 139-40); and his warning to "Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn / When I depart" (ll. 77-78).
Also as so frequently in Virgil's Latin, again and again within "Laodamia" the direct object precedes the verb, reversing the usual English syntactical pattern. Often these transpositions occur at moments of dramatic or emotional intensity, where the inverted syntax helps to emphasize the significance of the noun which is being foregrounded, or to create a tone of suspense around the verb which is being delayed: for instance, in Laodamia's prayer within the first stanza, "my slaughtered Lord have I required" (l. 2), "Him of the infernal Gods have I desired" (l. 4), and "Celestial pity I again implore" (l. 5); in her attempt to embrace the shade of her husband, "Forth sprang the impassion'd Queen her Lord to clasp; / Again that consummation she essayed" (ll. 25-26); or at the moment of Protesilaus's disappearance, "The hours are past, too brief had they been years; / And him no mortal effort can detain" (ll. 153-54). In a similar manner, Wordsworth also habitually carries over into English the Virgilian pattern of long adjectival phrases modifying a noun (i.e., in "Alcestis, a reanimated Corse, / Given back to dwell on earth in beauty's bloom" [ll. 81-82]), as well as Latinate diction (i.e., in "Celestial pity" [l. 5], "corporeal mold" [l. 16], "reanimated Corse" [l. 81], and "consummation" [l. 26]) and the use of the more obscure secondary Latin meanings of words rather than the primary English ones (i.e., in "vital" for "living" in "vital presence" [l. 16], "expects the issue" for "awaits the outcome" in "she expects the issue in repose" [l. 12], "self-devoted" for "given over by himself" in "a self-devoted Chief- by Hector slain" [l. 48], and "revolved" for "turned over in thought" in "I then revolved / Our future course, upon the silent sea" [ll. 121-22]). Elsewhere Virgilian stylistic constructions are imitated, for instance in "What time the Fleet at Aulis lay enchained" (l. 120), a phrase that mimics the function of the Latin ablative absolute, and in "Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!" (l. 6) a line that replicates Virgil's habit of repeating an evocative word at moments of high pathos, as in the reiterated "te" in Orpheus's mourning for Eurydice at Georgics 4.465- 66, or in the emphatic repeated "hoc" in Anna's lament over Dido at Aeneid 4.675-76.
As he sought to emulate and outdo Virgil in "Laodamia," the use of Latinate words, expressions, and grammatical constructions, along with the poem's elevated personal pronouns ("thou," "thy," and "thee" are employed in the dialogue throughout), enabled Wordsworth to capture the lofty aspect of Virgil's style by pushing his own language to its expressive limits. As he noted following his comment to Lord Lonsdale about Virgil's "mixture of the elaborately ornate, and the majestically plain & touching," the "former quality is much more difficult to reach than the latter, in which whoever fails must fail through want of ability, and not through the imperfections of our language."21 Normal idiomatic English by itself could never recreate the effect of elaborate ornate-ness that Wordsworth thought both so crucial to Virgil's style and so difficult to capture in a translation. As a result, in his rendering of the Aeneid Wordsworth chose to employ what Graver has described as "a deliberately Latinate kind of English-Latinate in vocabulary, to recall the words Virgil actually used; Latinate in word order, to give emphasis to the same words Virgil emphasized; and Latinate in versification, to reflect the cadences of Virgilian hexameters, even in heroic couplets."22 In "Laodamia," of course, unlike in the translations, Wordsworth had no Latin original to work from; but as we have seen, he composed the poem on an avowedly Virgilian basis and in a consciously Virgilian spirit, and it is not surprising that he would have experimented with many of the same techniques for cultivating a Virgilian style and tone in English.
The areas of overlap among "Laodamia," Wordsworth's Aeneid translation, and Virgil's original Latin text are demonstrated by one especially significant feature of all three: the strong medial caesuras, interrupted clauses, and short rapid statements or questions that occur at moments of emotional intensity. For instance, Graver notes that in Wordsworth's translation of the anxious questions that Aeneas addresses to Hector's ghost as the Greeks overrun Troy (2.281-86), he deliberately keeps pauses and breaks in the same places as the Latin original:
O Light of Dardan Realms! most faithful Stay
To Trojan courage, why these lingerings of delay?
Where hast thou tarried, Hector? From what coast
Com'st thou, long-wish'd for? After thousands lost,
Thy kindred and thy friends, such travail borne
By all that breathe in Troy, how tired and worn
We who behold thee! But why thus return?
These gashes whence? This undeserv'd disgrace?
Who thus defil'd that calm, majestic face?23
Similarly, Venus's bitter complaint to Jupiter about the suffering of the Trojans on the ocean (1.250-53) is rendered by Wordsworth with its strong pauses and jarring short phrases intact:
But we, thy progeny, allow'd to boast
Of future Heaven-betray'd-our Navy lost-
Through wrath of One, are driven from the Italian coast.
Is piety thus honour'd? Doth thy grace
Thus in our hands the allotted sceptre place?24
Like the emotion in these two speeches of Aeneas and Venus (as both written by Virgil and translated by Wordsworth), Laodamia's intensity of surprise when Protesilaus appears to her manifests itself in the narrator's own broken syntax, short phrases, and strong caesuras:
O terror! what hath she perceived?-O joy!
What doth she look on?-whom doth she behold?
Her hero slain upon the beach of Troy?
His vital presence-his corporeal mold?
It is-if sense deceive her not-'tis He!
And a God leads him-winged Mercury!
(ll. 13-18)
Similar effects occur at moments of emotional turbulence throughout Wordsworth's poem: for instance in Laodamia's stuttered words to her husband about his act of self-sacrifice at Troy ("Supreme of Heroes- bravest, noblest, best! . . . / Thou found'st-and I forgive thee-here thou art- / A nobler counsellor than my poor heart" [ll. 49-54]), or in the description of her reaction to his disappearance ("Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes re-appears! / Round the dear Shade she would have clung-'tis vain" [ll. 151-52]).
Like Wordsworth's unusual syntax, diction, and versification in "Laodamia," apparently uncharacteristic elements of the story itself can also be explained through Virgil's shaping influence on the poem. For instance, Judith Page points out that Protesilaus's description of his act of self-sacrifice at Troy in terms of heroic action-"Old frailties then recurred:-but lofty thought, / In act embodied, my deliverance wrought" (ll. 137-38)-"seems alien to Wordsworth's repeated claims in his theory and in his letters that he is interested in thought, not external action or bold gestures."25 But Protesilaus's attitude here, however exceptional in the context of Wordsworth's entire body of work, is consistent with the Virgilian spirit of "Laodamia"; for it transposes to the Greek side of the conflict and to the outset of the Trojan War the sentiments displayed in Aeneas's speech to his Trojan companions during the war's final battle, when he urges them to sacrifice their lives in defense of their city:
iuvenes, fortissima frustra
pectora, si vobis audentem extrema cupido
certa sequi, quae sit rebus fortuna videtis.
. . . succurritis urbi
incensae. moriamur et in media arma ruamus.
[My men, hearts vainly valiant, if your desire is fixed to follow me in my final venture, you see what is the fate of our cause. . . . the city you aid is in flames. Let us die, and rush into the battle's midst!]
(2.347-53)
In a similar manner, Laodamia's allusion to her own failed attempts to persuade Protesilaus not to risk his life in the war before he set off for Troy ("Thou found'st . . . / A nobler counsellor than my poor heart" [ll. 53-54]) mirrors Hecuba's discouragement of her husband Priam from defending Troy as the city is taken by the Greeks (2.519-24).
Wordsworth's most important reworking of episodes from the Aeneid within "Laodamia," however, involves Virgil's two major representations of a lover consumed by the effects of grief, Andromache in book 3 and Dido in book 4. Wordsworth combines elements of both tales within his own story, portraying a love that is simultaneously (like Andromache's) admirable for its faithfulness to a dead spouse and (like Dido's) destructive in its excessive passion. The Andromache episode parallels the situation of Wordsworth's poem in its depiction of a devoted wife who is absorbed in grief over the loss of a husband killed in the Trojan War. During his journey from Troy to Italy, Aeneas seeks out Hector's widow Andromache after he hears of her improbable fate: led away from Troy as the concubine of Achilles's son Pyrrhus, she is now married to Helenus, Hector's brother, and with him rules over Greek cities inherited from their captor after Pyrrhus's death (3.294-97). Advancing from the harbor, Aeneas comes to a grove where by chance "dapes et tristia dona . . . / libabat cineri Andromache, Manisque vocabat / Hectoreum ad tumulum, viridi quem caespite inanem / et geminas, causam lacrimis, sacraverat aras" (Andromache . . . was offering her yearly feast and gifts of mourning to the dust, and calling the ghost to Hector's tomb-the empty mound of green turf that she had hallowed with twin altars, there to shed her tears) (3.301-5). The scene immediately evokes the opening stanza of Wordsworth's poem, in which Laodamia recalls how
With sacrifice, before the rising morn
Performed, my slaughtered Lord have I required;
And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,
Him of the infernal Gods have I desired.
(ll. 1-4)
Each woman seeks to call forth the dead man's spirit through sacrificial offerings and prayers-Laodamia by imploring the gods to return him to life, Andromache by summoning his ghost to the tomb; and each woman's rituals are interrupted by the arrival of a shocking visitor. Indeed, Aeneas's appearance so astonishes Andromache that she wonders whether he has actually, like Protesilaus, returned from the dead: after briefly fainting, she asks him, "verane te facies, verus mihi nuntius adfers, / nate dea? vivisne? aut si lux alma recessit, / Hector ubi est?" (Are you a real form, a real messenger, coming to me, goddessborn? Are you alive? Or if the light of life has left you, where is Hector?) (3.310-12). The effect of incredulity here is closely imitated by the similar flurry of abrupt, piercing questions that Wordsworth lets loose (in his own voice but from Laodamia's perspective) at the analogous moment in his story, as Protesilaus appears:
O terror! what hath she perceived?-O joy!
What doth she look on?-whom doth she behold?
Her hero slain upon the beach of Troy?
His vital presence-his corporeal mold?
It is-if sense deceive her not-'tis He!
(ll. 13-17)
In addition, the sorrow of both women is enhanced by their inability to mourn properly. Hector's old city is destroyed, and even his body is absent from the empty mound that Andromache has decorated with altars. Laodamia, for her part, simply refuses to accept the finality of death: if Andromache's ritual is an act of hopeless commemoration, Laodamia's is one of desperate hope that her prayers, as manifestations of "fervent love endowed / With faith" (ll. 7-8), will actually effect the miracle of her husband's return from the dead. But even though Andromache, unlike Laodamia, does not actually expect her husband's restoration to her, the last of the series of amazed questions that she poses to Aeneas-"aut si lux alma recessit, / Hector ubi est?" (Or if the light of life has left you, where is Hector?)-seems to express the same submerged wish. These questions by Andromache seeking confirmation of the reality of what she has just witnessed are then in turn echoed by Laodamia's request of Protesilaus: "Confirm, I pray, the Vision with thy voice: / This is our Palace,-yonder is thy throne; / Speak, and the floor thou tread'st on will rejoice" (ll. 32-34). And Aeneas's affirmative response to Andromache's questions-"vivo equidem vitamque extrema per omnia duco; / ne dubita, nam vera vides" (I live indeed, and drag on my life through all extremes; doubt not, for what you see is real) (3.315-16)-is paralleled by Protesilaus's own reassurance of his wife, even as he clarifies that he is not in fact alive: "Spectre though I be, / I am not sent to scare thee or deceive; / But in reward of thy fidelity" (ll. 38-40). Finally, in a larger structural similarity, after this opening to the encounter in each poem one of the characters goes on to discuss his or her final involvement in the events of the Trojan War, as Andromache describes Pyrrhus's taking of her as a captive after the final destruction of the city (3.321-29), and Protesilaus relates his death in the initial attack (ll. 43-48).
But though the two stories resemble one another in their broad outlines as well as significant details, the ultimate effect of all these symmetries is to make the areas of divergence between "Laodamia" and the Aeneid all the more striking. Wordsworth's reshaping and reframing of details from book 3 help to emphasize the very different charac- ter of his own protagonist and his judgment of her faults. Wordsworth gives us a grief-stricken wife using nocturnal sacrifices to "the infernal Gods" (l. 4) to effect a miracle, where Virgil had described a grieving wife who makes offerings in daylight (albeit in the lesser darkness of a grove) in accord with the accepted ceremonies of mourning. In contrast with the excessive passion for which Protesilaus admonishes Laodamia at the conclusion of his speech ("And thou, though strong in love, art all too weak / In reason, in self-government too slow" [ll. 139-40]), Andromache's grief, despite its displacement from Troy to her new city, is all properly contained and restrained within ritual. She seeks no exemption from the laws of mortality, unlike Laodamia, who hopes that the gods "Yet further may relent" by allowing Protesilaus to remain among the living because of the power of her love (ll. 86-90). Otherwise, she declares, she is determined to join him in death: "But if thou go'st, I follow" (l. 91). Andromache, by contrast, has lived on through all her suffering, enduring slavery and the destruction of her city as well as the death of her husband, and she has survived to rule again as a queen married once more to a prince of Troy. Just as she and Helenus have preserved the memory of Troy by replicating its landmarks in their new city (3.349-51), she carries forward the memory of her dead husband and offers it as an example to inspire the living, asking Aeneas about his son Ascanius: "ecquid in antiquam virtutem animosque virilis / et pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector?" (Do his father Aeneas and his uncle Hector arouse him at all to ancestral valour and to manly spirit?) (3.342- 43). Notably, when these heroic virtues are echoed in Laodamia's own praise of Protesilaus-"Supreme of Heroes-bravest, noblest, best! / Thy matchless courage I bewail no more" (ll. 49-50)- they are superlatives restricted to him in isolation, not examples to be imitated by the living. Unlike Andromache, Laodamia cannot reconcile herself to her husband's death or continue in life without him; and this failure to demonstrate the same self-control as her Virgilian counterpart is the immediate cause of her death. Her swoon of fear occurs not like Andromache's out of surprise at the visitor's appearance (3.308-9) but in despair at his disappearance, after she shrieks as Hermes comes to lead Protesilaus back to the underworld (l. 151). And where Andromache recovers from her fainting to pose her questions to Aeneas- "labitur et longo vix tandem tempore fatur" (She swoons, and at last after a long time speaks) (3.309)-Laodamia's own collapse is fatal: "Swift tow'rd the realms that know not earthly day, / He through the portal takes his silent way- / And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse she lay" (ll. 155-57).
The second major episode from the Aeneid that is recalled within "Laodamia" frames the first, since the encounter with Andromache in book 3 is described by Aeneas while he is feasting as a guest in Dido's palace. As with the Andromache episode, motifs, phrases, and images from Virgil's account of the affair between Dido and Aeneas are rearranged to serve a different function within Wordsworth's narrative, a verbal interplay that is suggestive of the deeper thematic connections between the stories of Dido and Laodamia. For instance, Protesilaus's description to Laodamia of the memories of her that nearly held him back from his act of self-sacrifice at Troy-"the joys we shared in mortal life,- / The paths which we had trod-these fountains-flowers; / My new-planned Cities, and unfinished Towers" (ll. 130-32)-calls to mind both Aeneas's first glimpse of the rising city of Carthage as he sees its towers, walls, roads, and harbors under construction (1.419-36), and the sudden halt to the work of building as a result of Dido's passion for him: "non coeptae adsurgunt turres . . . / pendent opera interrupta minaeque / murorum ingentes aequataque machina caelo" (No longer rise the towers begun . . . the works are broken off and idle- great menacing walls and cranes that touch the sky) (4.86-89). And the sudden appearance before Laodamia of Protesilaus accompanied by Hermes matches the appearance before Dido of Aeneas alongside his companion Achates, after the cloud in which Venus has concealed both of them suddenly dissolves (1.586-87). Protesilaus arrives displaying "Elysian beauty" and "melancholy grace" in "his deportment, shape, and mien," with his locks "redundant" and "lips as fair / As when their breath enriched Thessalian air" (ll. 94-95 and 59-60), and the impression of heroic beauty made by Aeneas as he emerges from the cloud is broadly similar:
restitit Aeneas claraque in luce refulsit,
os umerosque deo similis; namque ipsa decoram
caesariem nato genetrix lumenque iuventae
purpureum et laetos oculis adflarat honores.
[Aeneas stood forth, gleaming in the clear light, godlike in face and shoulders; for his mother herself had shed upon her son the beauty of flowing locks, with youth's ruddy bloom, and on his eyes a joyous lustre.]
(1.588-91)
Likewise, Laodamia's praise of her husband's exceptional valor, which sets him apart from other mortals-"Supreme of Heroes-bravest, noblest, best! / Thy matchless courage I bewail no more, / That then, when tens of thousands were deprest / By doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore" (ll. 49-52)-in general terms recalls Dido's praise of godlike Aeneas as she confesses her love for him to her sister Anna: "quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis! / credo equidem, nec vana fides, genus esse deorum. / degeneres animos timor arguit" (How noble his mien! How brave in heart and feats of arms! I believe it well-nor is my confidence vain-that he is sprung from gods. It is fear that proves souls base-born) (4.11-13).
The most significant resemblance between the tales of Dido and Laodamia lies in their parallel accounts of each woman's unrestrained love for a hero of the Trojan War. In both cases, this passion leads directly to the woman's death after the hero departs in spite of her pleas for him to remain, with Dido committing suicide when Aeneas abandons her to sail on to Italy. Both women begin by offering prayers and sacrifices to the gods for the fulfillment of their desires-in Dido's case in order to seek their favor when she decides to give in to her feelings for Aeneas, despite her earlier vow never to marry again after the murder of her husband Sychaeus (4.56- 64). Each hero justifies his departure to the woman by articulating an ideal of self-denying virtue, as Protesilaus urges Laodamia to "Learn by a mortal yearning to ascend / Towards a higher object . . . / That self might be annulled" (ll. 145-46 and 149) and counsels her "by fortitude to seek / Our blest re-union in the shades below" (ll. 141-42), while Aeneas tells Dido that he leaves her out of duty to the gods, his father, his son, and his people, suppressing his own desires in the process (4.345- 61). Furthermore, in both poems Hermes (or Mercury, his Roman name) comes down to earth in order to enforce time constraints and lead the hero away from his beloved: in "Laodamia" by returning to guide Protesilaus back to the underworld after the visit, which has been granted "at Jove's command" but limited to "three hours' space" (ll. 21 and 23); in the Aeneid by visiting Aeneas at Jupiter's behest in order to urge him to stop lingering in Carthage and pursue his fated course towards Italy (4.265-76 and 4.560-70). More broadly, the "Rebellious passion" and "tumult of the soul" (ll. 74-75) that Protesilaus warns Laodamia against are phrases that precisely capture the emotions tormenting love-stricken Dido as "est mollis flamma medullas / interea et tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus" (All the while the flame devours her tender heartstrings, and deep in her breast lives the silent wound) (4.66- 67) and "ingeminant curae, rursusque resurgens / saevit amor, magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu" (Her pangs redouble, and her love, swelling up, surges afresh, as she heaves with a mighty tide of passion) (4.531-32). And Wordsworth's description of his protagonist's death as "a trance of passion" (l. 160 in the original version of the much-revised penultimate stanza) could apply equally well to Dido's end, as she prepares her suicide "trepida et coeptis immanibus effera . . . / sanguineam volvens aciem, maculisque trementis / interfusa genas, et pallida morte futura" (trembling and frantic with her dreadful design, rolling bloodshot eyes, her quivering cheeks flecked with burning spots, and pale at the imminence of death) (4.642-44), and then perishes "nec fato, merita nec morte . . . / sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore" (neither in the course of fate nor by a death she had earned, but wretchedly before her day, in the heat of sudden frenzy) (4.696- 97). We also cannot help thinking of Dido when we read Wordsworth's description of Laodamia as "the impassion'd Queen," rushing to embrace her returned husband (l. 25).
Yet in spite of all these symmetries, as in the case of the Andromache episode, it is the differences between the two poets' ways of treating their broadly similar tales that underscore Wordsworth's distinctive purpose in "Laodamia." Lawrence Lipking notes that in the passage from book 6 where Laodamia appears alongside Dido in the underworld, "Virgil specifically emphasizes that the heroines of the Mourning Fields are victims and describes Dido's own fate as unjust (iniquo)"; by contrast, even though Wordsworth cited these Virgilian lines as the basis for "Laodamia," in his own poem he "turns all his efforts toward demonstrating the eternal justice of the fate that such women suffer."26 As we have seen, it is true that Wordsworth did explicitly justify one set of revisions to the poem's penultimate stanza in such terms, writing to his son in 1830 that the version of the stanza first published in 1815, in which "the Heroine was dismissed to happiness in Elysium," had to be changed because it would undermine the narrative's moral lesson if Protesilaus "exhorts her to moderate her passion-the exhortation is fruitless-and no punishment follows." Wordsworth here criticizes his own earlier poetic choice, and in the revised version of the stanza published in 1827 he carefully inverted the language he had used in 1815 in order to negate the morally troubling implications of the original text. The 1815 stanza had begun with the poet's own plaintive cry, demonstrating his deeply felt sympathy for Laodamia: "Ah, judge her gently who so deeply loved!" (l. 158) It had then gone on to exonerate her of any crime, even as it explained her fate as the result of the passion that overwhelmed her-"Her, who, in reason's spite, yet without crime, / Was in a trance of passion thus removed" (ll. 159-60)-before concluding with the description of her death as an escape from mortal cares followed by immediate entry into a tranquil Elysian afterlife: she is "Delivered from the galling yoke of time / And these frail elements to gather flowers / Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers" (ll. 161- 63). In their portrayal of an almost merciful death, these lines recall Juno's sending down of Iris to Dido in book 4 of the Aeneid, "longum miserata dolorem / difficilisque obitus . . . / quae luctantem animam nexosque resolveret artus" (pitying her long agony and painful dying . . . to release her struggling soul from the prison of her flesh) (4.693-95). By contrast, in the 1827 version of the stanza the poet's own personal pity for Laodamia and his plea to the reader to judge her "gently" both vanish from the first line, replaced by the sterner judgment of the gods ("By no weak pity might the Gods be moved"); the assertion of Laodamia's innocence in the next two lines is replaced by an acknowledgment of her guilt, albeit one that is weakened by its deliberate indirectness ("She who thus perished not without the crime / Of Lovers that in Reason's spite have loved"); and in the final three lines of the 1827 stanza Laodamia is punished by being explicitly cut off from the Elysian tranquility that she had been granted in the 1815 version ("Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime, / Apart from happy Ghosts-that gather flowers / Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers"). To this point, Lipking's claim that Wordsworth "turns all his efforts toward demonstrating the eternal justice" of Laodamia's fate seems vindicated by both the poet's revision of the text in 1827 and his own comment to his son about that revision in 1830.
However, Wordsworth's work on this crucial section of the poem continued long after 1830, and a glance at his shifting accounts of Laodamia's fate over the next fifteen years reveals a more complex narrative stance, one that seeks to mediate between the two opposed positions within the 1815 and 1827 versions of the stanza: punishment is balanced against pity, and justice requires a penalty that is proportionate, not indiscriminate. In 1832, Wordsworth replaced the description of Laodamia's punishment from five years earlier-"Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime"-with a line that mitigated her suffering by implying that it would only last for a limited span of time: "Was doomed to wear out her appointed time." The new line reshapes our understanding of Laodamia's fate by implying that she will eventually be released from her place "Apart from happy Ghosts," and presumably will join them in gathering "flowers / Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers" after she has suffered the precise degree of punishment that her guilt requires. This version of Laodamia's fate falls halfway between her immediate release into Elysian bliss in 1815 and her eternal exclusion from it in 1827.
Eight years later, in the 1840 edition of the poem, Wordsworth moved back even further in the direction of his initial 1815 position of sympathy for Laodamia, without abandoning his later acknowledgment and punishment of her guilt. He did so by indicating in the new opening lines of the stanza an understanding of human weakness which helps to explain, if not extenuate, her crime: "She-who though warned, exhorted, and reproved, / Thus died, from passion desperate to a crime." The reference to "the just Gods, whom no weak pity moved," instead of beginning the stanza, is now delayed to the third line. As a result, the narrator's perspective now precedes and is distinguished from that of the gods; and his stance seems to incorporate the very "pity" or compassion that they lack, as it balances the fact that Laodamia had erred despite having been "warned, exhorted, and reproved" against the explanation that she died because she was "from passion desperate to a crime." In other words, she disobeyed her husband's warning only because she was made desperate by the extreme nature of her passion; she is at fault, but it is a fault which she slips into out of weakness rather than consciously choosing it. The final revisions to the stanza, published in 1845, make the narrator's mitigation of the originally pitiless judgment pronounced by "the just Gods" even stronger, as the passage now begins:
Thus, all in vain exhorted and reproved,
She perished; and, as for a wilful crime,
By the just Gods whom no weak pity moved,
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time.
Here Laodamia's crime is not merely explained by the force of her passion as it had been five years earlier, but the nature of her guilt is called into some doubt. She is being punished by the gods "as for a wilful crime"-i.e., either because or merely as if her crime had been willful. The ambiguity of the phrasing suggests that the human complexity of Laodamia's story requires from the poet and the reader a nuanced judg- ment that is not reducible to either utter condemnation or simple vindication.
Taken as a whole, the history of Wordsworth's revisions to the stanza between 1815 and 1845 shows him departing from Virgil's refusal in book 4 to offer any explicit moral judgment about the events that he recounts. Like Wordsworth, who as Page observes seeks "to enter into Laodamia's thoughts and feel her passion," Virgil in book 4 enters into the tortured mind of his protagonist as she watches Aeneas's men prepare to depart, exclaiming in his own voice "quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus, / quosve dabas gemitus" (What feelings then were yours, Dido, at such a sight! or what sighs did you utter) (4.408-9).27 Virgil also generalizes from these events to remark on the hold of passion over all human beings, declaring "improbe Amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!" (O relentless Love, to what do you not drive the hearts of men) (4.412). But he goes no further, leaving unresolved the question of ultimate responsibility for the tragedy. We as readers are left to determine whether to assign blame to Dido for failing to restrain her passion, to Aeneas for first succumbing to it and then leaving her, to her sister for encouraging her new love, or to the gods themselves for their manipulations of everyone involved. Unlike Laodamia, Dido is never given a clear warning about the possible consequences of her behavior that would help to underscore her guilt if she ignored it. Indeed, where Laodamia's husband warns her while her death can still be prevented, it is Dido who reproaches herself for her own sin of unbounded passion after it has already been committed, lamenting just before her suicide that "non servata fides cineri promissa Sychaeo" (The faith vowed to the ashes of Sychaeus I have not kept) (4.552). In the original 1815 version of the penultimate stanza, Wordsworth had adopted a tone reminiscent of Virgil's sympathetic identification with Dido; but over the next thirty years he moved away from this Virgilian stance, eventually offering an explicit moral judgment that included within it mercy and pity as well as punishment. Over the course of his successive revisions, Wordsworth sought to establish Laodamia's responsibility for her own fate while also suggesting that the agony that drove her to it deserves our sympathy. As he put it in the first line of the next stanza (a line that remained unchanged throughout all the revisions of the passage preceding it), employing the language of justice within a plea for compassion: "Yet tears to human suffering are due" (l. 164). Wordsworth here offers in his own voice an instructive moral response to the tragedy of self-destroying grief, where Virgil in book 4 had left the unresolved, bewildering chaos of life.
This last reshaping of a central episode of the Aeneid within "Laodamia" is the most significant example of Wordsworth's response to Virgil's epic in his own mythological narrative. A decade before he set out to produce a translation of the Aeneid that would remain faithful to the nuances of the Latin original, Wordsworth in this poem sought to cultivate his "loftier tone" by evoking and then transmuting Virgil's language, imagery, themes, and motifs in order to suit his own poetic purposes. In the depth and the variety of its relationships with the Aeneid, "Laodamia" is a testament to both Wordsworth's admiration for and his rivalry with his Roman predecessor. When read with an awareness of all its many layers of allusion, the poem constitutes one of the most multifaceted examples in literary history of an English poet's creative engagement with the classical inheritance.28
University of Dallas
1 Spiegelman, "Wordsworth's Aeneid," Comparative Literature 26 (1974): 97.
2 For the texts of these translations, see, respectively, William Wordsworth, Early Poems and Fragments, 1785-1797, ed. Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 590-96 and 614-47; and William Wordsworth, Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, ed. Bruce E. Graver (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 181-271.
3 See Wordsworth, Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, 178-79 and 273; and Duncan Wu, "Three Translations of Virgil Read by Wordsworth in 1788," Notes and Queries, n.s., 37 (1990): 407-9.
4 See Graver, "Wordsworth and the Language of Epic: The Translation of the Aeneid," Studies in Philology 83 (1986): 261-85, and "Wordsworth's Georgic Beginnings," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 147-56.
5 See Graver, "Wordsworth's Georgic Pastoral: Otium and Labor in 'Michael,'" European Romantic Review 1 (1991): 119-34.
6 See Peter J. Manning, "Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Its Epigraphs," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (1983): 526-40.
7 See John A. Hodgson, " 'Was it for This . . . ?': Wordsworth's Virgilian Questionings," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 125-36; Bruce E. Graver, "'Honorable Toil': The Georgic Ethic of Prelude I," Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 346-60; Duncan Wu and Nicola Trott, "Three Sources for Wordsworth's Prelude Cave," Notes and Queries, n.s., 38 (1991): 298-99; and Arnd Bohm, "Toys of Wrath: The Prelude 10:363-74 and Aeneid 7:374-84," Wordsworth Circle 36 (2005): 124-26.
8 Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 189 and 191-92.
9 Taylor, "Wordsworth's Vergil: 'Laodamia' and the Sixth Book of the Aeneid," Vergilius 26 (1980): 39.
10 Graver, "Wordsworth's Georgic Beginnings," 146-47.
11 Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807-1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 529.
12 Ibid., 152 and 529.
13 Except where otherwise noted, all quotations and translations from the Aeneid in this article (cited subsequently within the body of the text by book and line) are drawn from H. Rushton Fairclough, trans., Virgil, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999-2000).
14 For Wordsworth's comment, see his Shorter Poems, 1807-1820, 530. Except where otherwise noted, quotations from "Laodamia" in this article (cited subsequently within the body of the text by line) are drawn from the text of the poem at its first publication in 1815, as reproduced in Shorter Poems, 1807-1820, 147-52 ("Reading text 2").
15 Ibid., 530.
16 The echoes of books 1 and 6 of the Aeneid discussed above in this and the previous paragraph are noted briefly in Kevin F. Doherty's "The Vergilian Wordsworth" (The Classical Journal 49 [1954]: 221-25) and Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry ([New York: Norton, 1963], 62- 64).
17 Robert Woof, ed., William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, 1793-1820 (London: Routledge, 2001), 1.815.
18 Ibid., 1.333; Wordsworth, Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, 567.
19 Wordsworth, Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, 564.
20 Ibid., 563-64.
21 Ibid., 567.
22 Graver, "Wordsworth and the Language of Epic," 264.
23 Ibid., 265- 69.
24 Ibid., 275-76.
25 Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 89.
26 Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 138.
27 Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, 82.
28 I would like to thank Professor James Engell for his advice as I prepared this article for publication.
Copyright The University of North Carolina Press Summer 2015