@article{oai:icu.repo.nii.ac.jp:00004357,
 author = {Simons, Christopher E. J.},
 issue = {48},
 journal = {人文科学研究 : キリスト教と文化},
 month = {Dec},
 note = {William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an experienced traveller and tourist, whose 
poetry was strongly influenced by his travels. He travelled in Europe his whole life, 
from his first extraordinary walking tour of the Swiss Alps as a university student in 
1790. He lived in France in 1791–2, in the months before the Revolution descended into 
the Terror, and in Lower Saxony in 1798–9. During the Peace of Amiens he crossed the
channel to Calais, where he met his French daughter for the first time. By 1820, he had 
a large family of his own in England; for the first time in his life, he also had some 
disposable income. In this year he achieved his ambition to repeat his continental tour of 
1790—but this time, not as a backpacker. He toured continental Europe with his wife 
Mary and sister Dorothy, and others. This paper presents preliminary findings from 
field research on Wordsworth’s tour of continental Europe in 1820, focusing on his 
experiences along the Rhine River. Thematically, the paper focuses on the idea of 
enchantment and disenchantment in the tour poems written about the Rhine area, and 
published in Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 (1822). The paper reads the 
themes of enchantment and disenchantment in several contexts, including poetic, 
technological, religious, and biographical (as expressions of waxing and waning poetic 
power). The paper hypothesises that in sonnets about Aachen, Cologne, and the 
‘magical’ landscapes of the Rhine, the texts express tensions of enchantment and 
disenchantment. These tensions often stem from the difference between the poetic 
observer’s ‘fanciful’ (fantastical or magical) representations of subjects, and the 
responses of the modern traveller: disappointed, confused, fearful, etc. The paper further 
hypothesises that in some cases these tensions stem from shifts in the economic and 
technological contexts of Wordsworth’s travels, in terms of their effects on the velocity 
and vantage point of the poetic observer. The paper analyses six sonnets and one 
‘Hymn’, written about landscapes beginning in Aachen and Cologne, and stretching 
south along the Rhine to the Schaffhausen Falls on the German/Swiss border. The paper 
concludes that the tensions of enchantment and disenchantment that run through the 
poems’ fanciful imagery relate not only to changes in the traveller’s velocity and 
perspective, but also to the poems’ engagement with religious and political conflict. The 
Rhine poems use fanciful and mythic imagery to express Protestant unease at praising 
Catholic antiquities; but at least one poem suggests the possibility of reconciliation 
between Christianity and Islam.},
 pages = {169--223},
 title = {Enchantment and Disenchantment in Wordsworth’s 1820 Rhine Poems},
 year = {2016}
}