ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses "Michael" as a poem of historical succession, sacrifice, and "place-keeping", and about "place-keeping" as a function of that numerical anomaly, zero. It examines the "sense of place" in William Wordsworth, the more tenuous become the connections between him and the "place" one wish to make for him in history. Reeve Parker, underscoring the sacrificial logic of "Michael" as a poem about poetic succession, with Michael himself in the role of patriarchal poet, cites Wordsworth's appended observation that the sheepfold Michael conceives as a "covenant" between himself and Luke, the son on whom he has set his hopes of ancestral salvation. Wordsworth's obsession with stones and numbers in Lyrical Ballads reappears in the following few years. Wordsworth's Arab dream about Euclid's Elements is but one of several places in his work indicating the consolations of reason that he found in geometry.
