WILLIAM WORDSWORTH HAS LONG BEEN RECOGNIZED AS A POET OF sudden irruptions, episodes that seemed trivial to many of his contemporary readers but strike us as quintessentially lyric moments. In the poet's terms, they take the form of either a "strange fit of passion" or a "whirl-blast"--a spontaneous feeling or a natural phenomenon, or a combination of the two. With respect to lyric tradition, they represent a major revision of the archetypal form of astonishment invented in Dante's vision of Beatrice in the Vita Nova and Petrarch's first arresting sight of Laura in the Rime Sparse. How to name the Wordsworthian moment? The poet's own phrase "spots of time," which described a few vignettes in The Prelude, has been broadly applied to a range of similar experiences, in the same way that Coleridge's term "conversation poem" has been appropriated as a generic category. "Epiphany" has also been an important designation, but despite its descriptive power, it is something of an anachronism: a theological term reinterpreted by Modernist aesthetics and applied to Romantic-era anecdotes. I propose to explore the explanatory possibilities of a term that Wordsworth did know, and frequently used: surprize. Just at the outset, I use the now-obsolete spelling as a mark of the distance between our verbal usage and the nuances Wordsworth would have known, and as an emphatic reminder of a term that had great currency in eighteenth-century novels and aesthetic discourse. The word "surprise" figures in some of the poet's most striking phrases of astonishment: the Boy of Winander's "gentle shock of mild surprise" at the aural jolt of the owls' silence and the world's susurrus; the leech-gatherer's "flash of mild surprise" at his questioner's curiosity; the child whose "mortal Nature" trembles "like a guilty Thing surprised"; the strange experience of being "surprised by joy." (1) I would like to resituate such anecdotes within an eighteenth-century discourse that conceived of surprise as a component of aesthetic response, a phenomenon of cognition and emotion, and a narrative crux.
