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Lyric Over‐Hearing: Wordsworth’s Intent to Steal

2022; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12650

1467-8705

Chris Townsend,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees!1 ‘A slumber did my spirit steal, /I had no human fears.’ Given that Wordsworth’s celebrated lyric is suspended in its entirety above this essay, there is a decent chance that you, reader, will have noticed the typographical error in that opening quotation: a slumber did my spirit steal. Then again, perhaps not. Exactly that typo, or misquotation, or mishearing, or misremembering, has proven to be a surprisingly pervasive one, and the poem has been accidentally made into one about stealing by readers both relatively unfamiliar with Wordsworth and those very familiar indeed. Speaking only to those who teach Romanticism, I could likely leave off at anecdote – certain as it is that anyone with experience teaching the poem will have heard it mislabeled, or else misquoted it themselves. But evidence beyond the anecdotal is within easy reach. Bedraggled pre-university students of poetry looking for help, and not hindrance, in engaging with the English canon might turn to the website Enotes, where they will find an analysis that begins ‘A slumber did my spirit steal.’2 That same formulation is on the contents page of volume two of Ernest de Sélincourt’s Poetical Works of Wordsworth as it appears in its current digital format on the Oxford University Press website (the print original has ‘seal’), and it’s there in Richard Holmes’s majestic retelling of Coleridge’s relationship with Wordsworth in Coleridge: Early Visions.3 E. M. Forster repeated it when making the point that ‘it does not matter who wrote “A slumber did my spirit steal”’, and the same formulation survived across four editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature from 1932 to 1967.4 When in 1935 the Washington Post published the poem, as verses ‘Out of the Past,’ the newspaper likely contributed to future confusion by writing ‘steal’ in place of ‘seal’ in both headlined title and first line (Fig. 1).5 It’s hard to speak with certainty about when the poem was first mistitled, but it does appear to be a product of the rise of professional literary criticism more than one of editing. The major nineteenth-century editions of Wordsworth’s poetry don’t print that mistake, but it’s there in an entry on ‘How to Read Wordsworth’ in the periodical Queries in 1888, as well as in The Nature and Elements of Poetry in 1892 and the Manual of English Literature of 1894, amongst a good deal of other late Victorian examples.6 Thus the proliferation of ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’ rose with the discipline of literary studies, and by 1913 it was entirely possible for Egerton Smith to write a chapter on types of rhyme that began by quoting Wordsworth’s lyric in full, with that crucial rhyme word ‘steal.’7 Part of the more recent strain of confusion has no doubt stemmed from the fact that the joint volume of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry known as the ‘Christabel Notebook’, which contained the now missing manuscript of ‘A slumber’, was until November 2020 catalogued online as having once held ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’.8 Then there are the peer-reviewed scholarly articles that quote it as ‘steal’, either in passing or, occasionally, during sustained commentaries on Wordsworth’s sequence of lyrics known as the ‘Lucy’ poems.9 Perhaps the most high-profile of these is ‘Destroying Literary Studies’, the well-known polemic by René Wellek.10 Some of these in particular display the deceptive character of Wordsworth’s title. Even as he explains the source of Thomas Hardy’s ‘ere slumber their senses could seal’, Tim Armstrong refers to the line as ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’.11 And Claire Colebrook’s restatement of a hypothetical ‘“text” that seems to have magically appeared with no reference to any human intent’, a thought experiment originally posed by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, actually reads a little differently due to its mistitling: ‘picture walking along a beach and finding “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal” inscribed in the sand; and then imagine, more implausibly still, that a wave washes away those lines to reveal the next line of the poem’.12 Several modern academic monographs have repeated the same spelling in reference to Wordsworth, and yet more refer to ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’ in their indexes.13 As recently as February 2020, David García refers to ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’ in a review of James Robert Woods’s Anecdotes of Enlightenment.14 As typographical errors, or mishearings, or unchecked expectations go – whichever it may be – this one has stolen itself into the minds of many readers and there remained as alternative canon. Wherefore the insistence of this misidentification? There’s the grammar of the line, for starters. It’s remarkably unclear how the poem wants us to handle that initial inversion – a slumber did my spirit seal – meaning we could equally read it as being about a slumber that was sealed by a spirit, or a spirit sealed by a slumber. There’s a sense of a Germanic influence on the syntax here, and Wordsworth did write it in Goslar, as he struggled to come to terms with the German language himself. Regardless, having read the poem through in its entirety, we are scarcely in a better position to say what either version might mean. ‘Stealing a slumber’ makes a kind of intuitive sense: the action of catching forty winks, or stealing a nap, seems consonant with the dreamscapes associated with Romantic lyricism. M. D. Walhout, in an article on the poem’s first line, exhaustively catalogues a rich poetic tradition of eighteenth-century sealed slumbers (‘Till slumber seal’d his weeping eyes’), noting that Wordsworth steps outside of tradition by making it spirit, and not a pair of eyes, that becomes sealed.15 The funny thing is that Walhout’s method, of enumerating literary precedents, can also be employed to make the case that Wordsworth had stealing in mind, and not sealing. Consider: ‘Or if a Slumber steal upon my Eyes’ (Dryden), ‘And pleasing slumber steal upon his eyes’ (Pope), ‘And softer slumbers steal her cares to rest’ (Darwin), ‘That steals their Slumbers from my weary Eyes’ (Leapor), ‘Lest Slumber steal one moment o’er thy Soul’ (Young), or countless other examples.16 Not only is there a clear poetic tradition of pairing slumber with stealing as well as with sealing – to the point of it being a cliché – but it’s notable that that verb, in such formulations, is used to mean both ‘to move by stealth’ and ‘to take away’. Yet more surprising is the fact that Wordsworth himself had already used a very similar formulation prior to the Lyrical Ballads, in the verses now published as ‘Written in Very Early Youth’: ‘Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal/O’er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky’ (5–6). Here slumber is very clearly able to ‘steal’, in the sense of it moving stealthily across the landscape and sky. That surprising parallel suggests that to Wordsworth’s ears, too, it was an easy trip from ‘seal’ to ‘steal’, and it begs the question as to how much the later line was actually supposed to echo the former. Paul H. Fry, who ranks amongst the critics who have taken note of the readerly tendency to lip ‘steal’ over ‘seal’, offers an insight into this kind of verbal slippage in critical reading: ‘Misreading is elegy. When we misread “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” as “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal”, our misreading predicts and mourns the death of Lucy more quickly than Wordsworth’s title does’.17 We experience ‘seal’ as ‘steal’, in short, because we expect to find Lucy stolen away. Peter de Bolla goes further still, noting the ‘pressure or pulsion’ in the ‘t’ of ‘spirit’ which ‘seems to infect, colonize, or appropriate the word which follows, “seal”’.18 In De Bolla’s analysis, there’s a ghostly trace of ‘spirit’ in ‘seal’, one with the power to produce what he characterises as that ‘phantom’ word which has haunted so many professional readings of Wordsworth’s poem. The result is a sense of loss before loss is yet described: ‘it is’, as De Bolla writes, ‘as if something has been stolen before the poem gets started’ (57). the power of the second stanza resides predominantly in the euphemistic displacement of the word “grave” by an image of gravitation (“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”). And though there is no agreement on the tone of this stanza, it is clear that a subvocal word is uttered without being written out. It is a word that rhymes with “fears” and “years” and “hears,” but which is closed off by the very last syllable of the poem: “trees.” Read “tears” and the animating, cosmic metaphor comes alive, the poet’s lament echoes through nature as in pastoral elegy. “Tears,” however, must give way to what is written, to a dull yet definitive sound, the anagram “trees.”19 Jonathan Culler, in a response to the published version of Eco’s lecture, is more sanguine in his assessment of Hartman: Hartman’s essay, whilst perhaps not fully illuminating the Wordsworth poem at hand, gives an example of that most basic critical tenet, a ‘literary sensibility or sensitivity’.23 It’s sensitive, that is, to the possibilities of interpretive reading, and not to the rules of the anagram. Hartman’s essay is, after all, a reflective exercise that is concerned with the limits of criticism in its own way; its title, ‘The Interpreter’s Freud’, foregrounds precisely the fact it is concerned with the truths that are generated when pre-established theoretical apparatus makes contact with text, and not with questions of intentionality. But there are doubtless also readers who will be largely, if not ‘fully’, convinced by Hartman’s hearing of ‘tears’ in ‘trees’, given its context within ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’. The misspelt anagram, if we’ll permit such a thing, does indeed pick up force by rhyming back to ‘fears’ and ‘years’, both of which are, like ‘trees’, sat in b-rhyme positions. What’s more, ‘fears’, ‘years’, and ‘tears’ all contain ears. So too does ‘hears’, a word used to deny the dead female her living senses, and there are ears too, albeit more subtle ones, in the cognates ‘earth’s’ and ‘earthly’. ‘Earthly years,’ in fact, produces something like the effect that Garrett Stewart calls the ‘transegmental drift’ between the sounds, if not the spellings, of words; we’re encouraged to hear – even if it barely registers on any conscious level – the phrase ‘earthly ears’.24 What’s going on, then: is this poem listening back at us as we listen in? Or does this profusion of ears – if we do interpret it as something beyond an ordinary product of arbitrary language use – act as a set of signals, as they seemed to do for Blake when he wove the acrostic ‘HEAR’ into London before ending that poem on hearse?25 It is certainly inviting to think of these ears as prompts for us, as readers, to listen and to hear more closely, as well as to pay attention to what we see: to hear as Hartman heard, or to read as the Edwardian prosodist Saintsbury advocated, with ‘eye-and-ear’ alike and at once.26 And it’s precisely in the light of such a methodology, of hearing the poem in front of us, that we become more sympathetic to notions like misspelt anagrams – where a shuffling of sounds is more arresting to the senses than is a reconfiguration of letters. John Stuart Mill’s distinction between rhetoric and poetics is well known: ‘eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard’.27 Current theorists of the lyric have argued that what Mill appears to have anticipated is the twentieth- and twenty-first-century common wisdom that poems, and especially lyric poems, are all governed by the logic of the Victorian dramatic monologue, which in turn is only a special instance of the lyric.28 Lyrics, the argument runs, are miniature speech-acts or narrative events, ones that we can (and, in practice, frequently do) begin to understand by first asking the question ‘who is speaking?’; in Mill’s idiom, that question is ‘who are we overhearing?’ Regardless of our position on the question of lyric’s narrative or non-narrative status, that last question is an arresting one, in terms of what it gets at in poetry. One definition of ‘overhearing’, after all, directly concerns that old bugbear, intentionality: to overhear, ‘contrary to the intention or without the knowledge of the speaker’.29 But as the Hartman case suggests, ‘over-hearing’ can carry different weight, too, in terms of hearing too much. It’s such expanded definitions of ‘overhearing’ that concern Lisa Lai-ming Wong in her seminal essay ‘A Promise (Over)Heard in Lyric’, in which she puts pressure on the subjunctive mood of lyric thinking as experienced not once, but again and again – heard too many times, even.30 This kind of reading is consonant with recent scholarly investigations into the ‘sounds’ of silent texts. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Douglas Dworkin set into motion a renewed interest in poetry’s sounds in a 2009 edited collection that aimed to relegate the sound work of poetry from the sidelines to the mainstream of critical encounters.31 Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things reconsiders literature itself as an event of hearing, where the silent letters and words on the page are nevertheless sounded in the act of reading, and where those silent ‘sounds’ become a central part of textual meaning.32 And Elizabeth Helsinger is similarly interested in how the ‘peculiar music’ of nineteenth-century verse demands ‘that we experience for ourselves how thought can be set in motion by the sound, touch, and sight of a poem’.33 Reading in this tradition, questions arise that perhaps weren’t meant to be heard, and, in the process of attuning our critical ears to texts, we might also hear the background mutterings of Wimsatt and Beardsley, warning us against renewing the fallacy of authorial intention. Hearing, yes; but on whose terms? It could well be that there is something in the sounds of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ that has us hear too much. It is this poem, after all, that Laura Mandell turns to when making the case that ‘Wordsworth’s poetry can move the reader from seeing visual to hearing acoustic images by exploiting the very visuality of the printed letter’.34 Accepting something of the truth of that assertion, what follows is an investigation of the possibility that ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ wants to be misheard, and indeed that good interpretation is sometimes an event of over-hearing or hearing too much. To address the question of whether this ghostly sense of ‘stealing’, which at once compounds elegy and preempts loss in the poem, should be credited to reader or to author, I’m taking a sidelong approach to it, via the question of stealing in other works of the period by Wordsworth. To do so is to read ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ in the spirit of Hugh Sykes Davies, who sees the poem as autonomous in relation to the other ‘Lucy’ lyrics, but also views it as a formulation of a quintessentially Wordsworthian experience that is traceable across the poems of the 1790s more broadly.35 To this extent I’m keeping one eye on authorial intention, and this is fitting treatment for a poem that has received an abundance of attention in relation to questions of intent and interpretation. Mandell calls it ‘arguably the most explicated poem that has been written in the English language’,36 and a decent case can be made in support of that argument; exhibit ‘A’ would be Brian G. Caraher’s monograph Wordsworth’s ‘Slumber’ and the Problematics of Reading, a lengthy study of the critical legacy of this eight-line poem.37 Two classic accounts, by Cleanth Brooks and F. W. Bateson, illustrate the poem’s complexity by the fact that they appear to directly contradict one another. As John Baker Jr. succinctly puts it, ‘Bateson maintained that the speaker rises to a state of exultation in his contemplation of the now dead “Lucy’s” pantheistic communion with a state of nature, whereas Brooks conjectured that the speaker finds himself in a state of “agonized shock” as he contemplates “her utter and horrible inertness”’.38 E. D. Hirsch was responding to that contradiction when he took up the case of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ to make claims about the nature of ‘objective interpretation’, versus what Eco would call over-interpretation.39 Hirsch ultimately came down on Bateson’s side, not because he was more convinced by the Wordsworth-as-pantheist view, but because he himself placed emphasis on intention and on ‘plausibility’: given what Wordsworth wrote elsewhere, Hirsch claimed, it’s more likely the case that he would also have written the kind of poem that Bateson described. Thus, probability is offered as a form of evidence in critical reading. Not all critics have been so keen to show deference to authorial intention. J. Hills-Miller infamously characterised Wordsworth’s ‘touch of earthly years’ as ‘a form of sexual appropriation which leaves the one who is possessed still virgin if she dies young’, and he takes great liberties with the text throughout his reading; a claim about the name ‘Lucy’ – meaning light, or lucid – as part of the larger argument that the poem concerns the loss of logos, comes in spite of the fact that that name doesn’t appear in the poem at all.40 Knapp and Michaels, the originators of the fable of Colebrook’s I quoted above, that concerning an intentionless poem washed up by the sea, take aim at poststructuralist readings such as Miller’s, which they see as wanting to split apart the ‘in fact inseparable’ partners ‘authorial intention and the meaning of texts’ (p. 12). And it is to Knapp and Michaels’ essay that Virginia Jackson looks back when formulating the view, which has proved so influential in modern lyric studies, that through a ‘lyricization’ of poetry we have come to read a vast range of poem types through the single, and singularly modern, lens of ‘lyric’; for Jackson, implicit in the account of Knapp and Michaels is the assumption not just that those words on the beach are a text, but that they are a poem – and maybe even a poem we recognise as being by Wordsworth.41 Where we arrive, then, is at a poem that is caught in a critical double-bind: a case-study for intentionality because of its status as (short) lyric, yet treated as lyric precisely because it raises questions of intent. Take, holy earth! all that my soul holds dear: Take that best gift which Heaven so lately gave.44 And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat Went heaving through the water, like a Swan; When from behind that craggy Steep, till then The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct, Uprear’d its head: I struck, and struck again, And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff Rose up between me and the stars, and still, With measur’d motion, like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn’d, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree. Love, now an universal birth, From heart to heart is stealing, From earth to man, from man to earth, –It is the hour of feeling. Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain Heaven, receiv’d Into the bosom of the steady Lake. This Boy was taken from his Mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full ten years old. —Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot, The Vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangs Upon a Slope above the Village School, And there, along that bank, when I have pass’d At evening, I believe that oftentimes A full half-hour together I have stood Mute—looking at the Grave in which he lies. She died and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene, The memory of what has been And never more will be.–– What we read of in ‘Three Years She Grew’, and what we can bring towards ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, is a particular kind of Wordsworthian experience: the adult, who knows a thing or two about death (unlike the child in ‘We Are Seven’) gains a deeper experience of what it is to be connected to the natural world: to its cycles of life, to the heaths that are our inheritance, and, as in ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, to the rocks and stones and trees with which we will all eventually roll. Thus what appears as stealing – the taking away of the life of a child – is again more concerned with the sense of ‘stealing away’ or ‘stealing across’ or, as in the boat-stealing episode, ‘stealing back’ than it is with outright theft. There is a sense of return: from the mystery of our immaterial beings back into the ground from which we once arose. And these are experiences that are familiar to Romantic scholarship, even if they are not ordinarily thought of as acts of stealing. Pastoral elegy, in which rocks, woods, and streams are called upon to mourn the death of a person, or to echo the complaint of a lover, seems too extravagant a genre for this chastely fashioned inscription. Yet the muted presence of the form reminds us what it means to be a nature poet. From childhood on, as the autobiographical Prelude tells us, Wordsworth was aware of ‘unknown modes of being’ and of strange sympathies emanating from nature. He was haunted by an animistic universe that stimulated, shared, and called upon his imagination.48 Wordsworth himself writes: “Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper.” Imbued with passion, they become weighty actors in their own right: “things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion.” Weighed in the balance of feeling, lyric poetry finds its own level.50 Given that a fact all critics can agree on is that this is a poem about life and death, it’s notable that ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ never uses either of those words, or anything too much like them. Rather, its terms describe how someone used to appear untouched by earthly years – and it was merely an appearance or seemingness – followed by the present-tense image of that same person now that she is unmoving and non-perceiving. As Jacobus notes, the movement between stanzas in the poem, the switch from ‘then’ to ‘now’ that marks out the crucial moment for De Man in his reading of the poem, is in an important sense hardly a movement at all; we turn from someone who ‘cannot feel’ to someone who cannot hear or see. What Lucy ‘cannot feel’ is the touch of earthly years, but thanks to the power of that mid-sentence line break, Wordsworth also offers us a proleptic image of non-feeling in a totalizing sense. She couldn’t feel, but now she is ‘with’ – and thus, we often assume, ‘like’ – rocks, stones, and trees. In fact, this poem about loss is staged as a series of losses, and the deeper we read into the poem, the more we lose purchase on what might look like the consolatory gifts of death. Primed with the knowledge that Wordsworth is a Romantic poet, we might naively want to posit that the final lines of the poem sound a note of consolation in the images of nature: Lucy is now more deeply connected to natural forms. Subscribing to such a view, we’d be in good company: ‘Lucy is actually more alive now that she is dead’, writes F. W. Bateson.52 Even if this were the case, such a natural connection here depends upon a literal, not figurative, death and thus upon the subject at hand’s inability to appreciate any consolation whatsoever. It’s consolation for us, not for Lucy. As Robert Burns Neveldine writes in a footnote to an essay on ‘Nutting’, ‘it remains to be asked whether the cost to Lucy has been too great, especially since the speaker considers only herself’ (and note in this context, in turn, that Neveldine is amongst those who refer to the poem as ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’).53 But beyond that fact, the poem itself actually says nothing like what Bateson wants to claim when it comes to nature. That second stanza in truth reads like a list of bald assertions, ones that might not have any intrinsic connection to one another: now she has no motion; now she cannot hear or see; now the world continues turning. It’s true that, as the world continues to turn without regard for the events of the poem, Lucy rolls ‘with’ those natural forms. But why assume that this togetherness is predicated upon her being dead, and thus read ‘with’ as ‘like’? We are all, surely, rolled with earth’s diurnal course anyway, living or dead. In that sense nothing appears to have changed here, beyond the dismissal of the ‘spirit’ of the opening line and those early abstractions, in favour of the fixed and tangible material forms of the latter lines. It is hard to see how that lack of real change could permit consolation. The sole note of redemption in the poem instead might come in the form of a modicum of knowledge, as glimpsed in the first line and not in the last. Where once a slumber sealed the speaker’s spirit, now it is, one would assume, unsealed. Another way of thinking of this is as release, or as catharsis. The soul was once caught up in daydreams about immortality, and now it is not. But that knowledge, of ‘the way things are’ and of the awful materiality of being, is hardly an especially welcome gift. If we were enough assured in our thinking to speak in declaratives about this highly ambiguous first line, then we might well claim that ‘to have no human fears is the same thing as to have a sealed spirit. Both of these are defined by the speaker’s false assumption that Lucy will not grow old or die’.54 Redemption here is the eradication of falsehood, yet its cost is not only the realization of the fact of mortality, but the actual death of a girl. However, this poem isn’t trying to place a message in our hands, or to declare anything as ‘true’ for the reader’s benefit. Rather, we are back at a distinction put forward by Leighton,55 between thought and thinking: the poem is performing the complex thinking of a grieving mind, as it equivocates between the allure of compensation and the heavy feelings that revoke such recompense. The poem turns on the insensible stealing away of spirit, and it is about the sense of having something stolen away. And it is also, finally, about a young woman who was of this earth and then was reclaimed by it: existing, as conscious spirit, out of step with the rest of the material universe, only to be stolen back by the earth itself. Something of that sort is behind the impulse by which scores of readers of Wordsworth have indeed produced ‘steal’ in place of ‘seal,’ thus affecting – at least initially – their account of the poem. Clearly, we are not in the realm of the ‘scientific’ or empirical models of linguistic rhythmical analysis that Perloff views as an impediment to the appreciation of poetry’s true sounds – there’s no final proof that can be produced to show that this is indeed what has led readers astray. But then, as Perloff further notes, from a certain view the lyric is ‘the mode of subjectivity – of self-reflexiveness, the mode in which a solitary “I” is overheard in meditation’.56 We’re back, then, at overhearing, and criticism of the lyric form is destined to retain some residual marks of all that syrupy subjectivity. Garrett Stewart, whose work I have been channeling, is attuned to the special ‘ambiguity’ of sibilance when he remarks that Pope’s phrase ‘thence your maxims bring’ can hit the ear as ‘thence your maxims spring.’57 To stave off that reduplication of the ‘s,’ it seems we sometimes multiply spirit’s ‘t’; it is the perceived threat of a slip, without fully realizing what the slip might be, that sees us alight on the sturdier semantic unit of ‘steal’ over ‘seal,’ and as De Bolla points out, it is a simple and short journey for the ‘t’ to contaminate, or co-animate, the line’s ending. It is worth appreciating again that such misidentifications are not overly common in the appreciation of poetry, especially not in the titles of major lyrics by one of the foremost poets of the English canon. Yet this one persists. This line, then, which is deeply infused with sonic play through the chain of sibilance, the near-bookending of Ls (slumb/seal), the echoing Is (did, spirit), is out to bamboozle from the very first. If we read its last word as ‘steal,’ it is because the line impels us to do so. You, reader, will now be in a position to judge whether such an act is valid as interpretation, or invalid as over-interpretation. There is always a third option, though: valid as over-interpretation. To alight on that third option, we will have to agree that there is some use in overhearing, and surrender to the notion that poems can want to be misheard. M. H. Abrams thinks something of the kind in his consideration of the critical treatment of ‘A slumber did my spirit steal,’ when he notes that J. Hillis Miller’s ‘allegorical’ and deconstructive reading is really just one kind of ‘over-reading’.58 And that Miller’s reading is faulty in Abrams’ view has little to do with the fact of over-reading itself – indeed, Abrams defends a strong tradition of over-reading as a useful kind of interpretation. Instead, it’s the nature of Miller’s transgression: we once would ‘over-read a text in a way that would enlarge and complicate the significance of the text-as-construed into a richer integrity’; Miller instead over-reads solely to ‘undermine’.59 Either way, we’re sauntering away from intentionality; but, after New Criticism and the supposed demise of the author, that is always largely the case when we sit down to interpret. It is because of this that W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks found it necessary to declare that the sp