Dorothy Wordsworth's Decomposing Compositions: Preservation, Loss, and the Remediation of the Modern Manuscript

abstract:In "Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature," a poem dated to the late 1820s, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) expresses, resists, and embraces ephemerality. She imagines an island breaking off from the shore and eventually vanishing, when it becomes "[b]uried beneath the glittering Lake" where "the lost fragments shall remain, / To fertilize some other ground." Reading this poem as a commentary on the fragmentary nature of both the archive and posthumous literary circulation, especially as it relates to the processes of remediation, this essay uses the poem's media history to account for the biographical construction of Wordsworth as a private, domestic writer.