Landon's Peele Castle

Landon's Peele Castle Isobel Armstrong (bio) No memory of its former state, No record of its fame,A broken wall, a fallen tower, A half-forgotten name,A gloomy shadow on the wave,And silence deep as in the grave. —"Pile of Fouldrey Castle, Lancashire" This is the first stanza of the initial poem, set against an engraving of Fouldrey castle, written by Letitia Elizabeth Landon for her inaugural volume as editor of Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book (1832). Heralding a new venture and standing at its beginning, the poem is clearly intended as an aesthetic agenda. The Scrap Book was a late comer among the sixty-three Christmas "gift books," or "annuals," being marketed at the time (a much maligned genre), popular collections of prints, poems and prose, commercial heirs of Rudolph Ackerman's Forget Me Not (1822).1 Landon's venture is highly unusual in being the work of a single author and in the choice of steel-engraved landscapes side by side with her poems, rather than the exotic female figures and society beauties associated with the feminized annuals. She was explicit that her poems did not "illustrate" these plates; instead, the engravings were instigators of an associative process—literally a pre-text.2 But she was self-consciously aware that the plates, technologized steel-engraved images for a mass-produced capitalist market, could become inadvertent commentaries on the poems. The engraving Pile of Fouldrey Castle (drawn by G. Pickering, engraved by Fenner & Co.) (fig. 1) used the medieval name for the castle, disguising the [End Page 154] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. G. Pickering, Pile of Fouldrey Castle (engraved by Fenner & Co.). 1832. Wikimedia Commons. poem's status as a challenge to Wordsworth. The castle's more recent name was and is Piel Castle; it is located on the southeast corner of Piel Island off Barrow-in-Furness (now in Cumbria) and is Wordsworth's "Peele Castle" of the poem that often goes simply by that name. Wordsworth's poem also relates to an image, George Beaumont's painting of the castle and angry seas off the island. Wordsworth's great poem on the death of his brother in 1805, "Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont" (1807), turns on the intense contrast between his fascination with the deep stillness and static quietude of the reflected image of Peele Castle and the psychic upheaval of mourning that led him to acknowledge the castle could be represented through violence—"This sea in anger, and that dismal shore" (line 44). In the poem's volta, Wordsworth reproaches himself for the "fond illusion" (29) that had insistently attempted to keep the image of calm in the same place—in the fantasmatic permanence of the present tense. The castle's "form was sleeping on a glassy sea" (4), as if the reveries of the unconscious in sleep were reflected in the image's very presence. "When'er I looked, thy Image still was there; / It trembled, but it never passed away" (7–8). The castle's motionless, "still" image was an image "still," always present, always manifest even when trembling in unseen currents of air or water. Not to "pass away" is to be deathless. But this "Elysian quiet without toil or stress" (26) turns out to be an illusory reading. Nevertheless, abandoning this image, Wordsworth says, cost him dearly: had he tried to reproduce the image this would have meant recreating [End Page 155] "The light that never was, on sea or land" (15) in a "chronicle of heaven" (22). But in the cause of recognizing a "pageantry of fear" (48), the vision's perpetuation was forfeited, surely a wounding act. Still, the poem's quiet quatrains assert submission to "a new control" (34): the poet is "humanized" (36); the castle, no longer an image but a material reality, offers a "sublime" (49) opposition to the angry seas and braves the storm. "Not without hope we suffer and we mourn": the plural "we" attempts to incorporate a community into the poem. Since Wordsworth's new realism is self-critical enough, it might...

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