In the first chapter of this book I tried to show how an image of fragmentation such as the ‘fragment of a wooden bowl’ in The Ruined Cottage can play a metonymic role in signifying a larger concern with fragmentation in Wordsworth's poetry. The present chapter wants to illustrate how fracture weaves itself into Wordsworth's texts syntactically, namely, by way of a rhetorical and grammatical figure. The analysis will concentrate on the figure of parenthesis. To ensure a clear focus, I will limit the reading of this figure – at once rhetorical and grammatical – to some specific moments in The Prelude.

Parenthesis is both a punctuation mark and a rhetorical figure. The syntactical break in a textual structure by means of a parenthetical sign is fundamentally disruptive in its effects. Grammatical treatises of the eighteenth century, which often include a section or chapter on parenthesis, are as insistent on this as today's reference works. Parenthesis, both as a grammatical unit and as a rhetorical move, produces a hiatus and a fracture in thought and language.