William Wordsworth : Lyrical Ballads 1798, with Some Poems of 1800 9781847600097, 9781847600653

Citation preview

Running Head  1

William Wordsworth ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798)

by Richard Gravil HEB

Humanities-Ebooks ☼ Literature Insights General Editor : C W R D Moseley

Publication Data © Richard Gravil, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Cover image: William and Dorothy in 1800 by Ophelia Gordon Bell

Reading this Book * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked ‘Bookmarks’ at the left of the screen. * To search, expand the search column at the right of the screen or click on the binocular symbol in the toolbar. * For ease of reading, use to enlarge the page to full screen * Use to return to the full menu. * Hyperlinks appear in Blue Underlined Text. To return from an internal hyperlink use the ‘previous view’ button and repeat if necessary. * For a computer generated reading use Read out Loud>

Licence and permissions Purchasing this book licenses you to read this work on-screen and to print one copy for your own use. Copy and paste functions are disabled. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Making or distributing copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author.

ISBN 978-1-84760-009-7

William Wordsworth: ‘Lyrical Ballads’ Richard Gravil

Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Richard Gravil took his BA in Wales and his PhD at East Anglia. He has taught in the University of Victoria, B.C., the University of Łódż, Poland, and the University of Otago, New Zealand. His books include Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862, (St Martin’s, 2000) Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Palgrave, 2003), and edited collections of essays on Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. He is managing director of Humanities-Ebooks, and Convenor of the Wordsworth Summer Conference and Winter School.

Poems treated in this insight ‘We are seven’ ‘Anecdote for fathers’ ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the shore, yet commanding a beautiful prospect’ ‘Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed’ ‘Lines written in Early Spring’ ‘Expostulation and Reply’ ‘The Tables Turned’ ‘The Female Vagrant’ ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ ‘The Last of the Flock’ ‘The Mad Mother’ ‘The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman’ ‘The Convict’ ‘Old Man travelling’ ‘Simon Lee’ ‘The Idiot Boy’ ‘TheThorn’ ‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ ‘Hart-leap Well’ ‘There was a boy’ ‘Nutting’ The Lucy Poems ‘The Brothers’ ‘Michael’

Part 1: Life, Times, Themes 1.1 General Introduction William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the leading literary critic of the Romantic era, wrote about Wordsworth’s style (in The Spirit of the Age, 1825) that: It is one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of and is carried along with the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His muse … is a levelling one.… it takes the commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature [i.e. what is natural, including human nature] is always interesting … without any of the ornaments of dress or pomp … to set it off. Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand them.

This is by no means a favourably prejudiced account: by 1825 Hazlitt and Wordsworth were political opponents. But he had met Wordsworth in 1798, while visiting the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he gave in his famous essay ‘My first Acquaintance with Poets’ one of the most vivid accounts of the poet. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more gaunt and Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed ...in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eyes (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance) an intense high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn stately expression of the rest of his face …. He sat down and talked very freely and naturally, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, and a strong tincture of the Northern burr, like the crust on wine.

Lyrical Ballads 

Wordsworth (shown here at 35 in a portrait by Henry Edridge, reproduced by courtesy of The Wordsworth Trust) is not normally thought of as a man with ‘a convulsive inclination to laughter’, but whether one responds to that hint of Wordsworth as a man of profound humour, and perhaps habitually ironic in his view of things, as well as distinctly unconventional, is crucial to one’s response to his poems. Hazlitt was one of the first to notice that Lyrical Ballads announced a revolution in literature. When he heard some of the poems read aloud, he said later, ‘the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me’, and the same feeling ‘that arises from the turning over of fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring’. 1.2 Wordsworth’s Early Life William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, in the English Lake District, in 1770. He grew up in a rather grand house, with a magnificent walled garden fronting the river Derwent. The earliest memory of his childhood recorded in his poetry is of playing in the shallows of that river, ‘a naked savage in the thunder shower’. Still earlier, he conjectures, his ‘infant thoughts’ were soothed by the sound of the same waters. He lost his mother in 1778 (shortly before his eighth birthday) and his father in 1783 (at 13), leaving himself, his brothers and his sisters dependant at first on relatives and later on each other. His father was an agent to Lord Lonsdale, the most powerful aristocrat in the region, and a man notorious for the abuse of power—a fact which prejudiced Wordsworth against the nobility in the early years of his life not least because it required a lengthy suit, over many years, to extract from His Lordship the substantial sums owing to the orphaned family. In 1779, shortly after the death of their mother, Wordsworth and his brother Richard entered Hawkshead Grammar School, on Esthwaite, where they not only lodged during the teaching year but also spent several of their summer vacations. This meant that he was separated from his beloved sister Dorothy, apart from a summer vacation in 1787 which is referred to in Book 6 of The Prelude. Their fuller reunion in April 1794 when they briefly lived together at Windy Brow in Keswick, coincided with his first steps towards maturity as a professional writer. The fact that Dorothy is really the subject of the last paragraph of ‘Tintern Abbey’ (the final poem in Lyrical Ballads 1798), as Wordsworth looks to the future as a writer, is not coincidental: from

Lyrical Ballads 

an early date he took it on himself to provide a roof for his sister, a commitment he maintained for the rest of their lives. His autobiographical poem The Prelude gives the impression that neither Hawkshead Grammar School nor Cambridge University left any deep impression on him. This is probably unfair. Hawkshead sent him to Cambridge with a far better than average grasp of the classics and of mathematics, and having been taught by a man with a real interest in recent (i.e. late eighteenth-century) English poetry, whose death he records in The Prelude, as of a friend and major influence. But it is impossible to read The Prelude without feeling that his most significant growth experiences did take place outside formal education, and especially in the kind of escapades in the fells or on the lakes that he describes in the first two books of that poem. Some of these experiences were beautiful, some frightening (in retrospect he believed he was ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’)—climbing crags in search of raven’s eggs, poaching, rowing on Windermere, skating on Esthwaite, watching a drowned man recovered from the lake, making horseback excursions as far as Furness Abbey, rowing a stolen boat on Ullswater, and so forth. These adventures involved exertion and adventure, and lead to self-knowledge and deeply felt experiences of nature. When the earliest version of that poem was belatedly published in 1926, these episodes had an enormous impact of poets such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, and it is largely through Wordsworth’s influence that the best known and best loved pieces of post-war poetry, when British life was overwhelmingly urban, are not only concerned with country experience but tend to be based on childhood memories—they involve significant encounters with nature (in Hughes’s case with a fox or pike; in Heaney’s case with angry frogs or blackberry picking). 1.3 Wordsworth in France Certainly the most significant thing that happened to Wordsworth at Cambridge (where he studied from October 1787 to January 1791) was his first long vacation from it. In 1790, with a college friend Robert Jones, he walked to Italy and back, via France and the Swiss Alps. Wordsworth and his friend Jones arrived in Calais on 13 July 1790. On the next day France celebrated the first anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. Their object was to see the Alps (which they did) but the major legacy of this trip was a sense of ‘human nature seeming born again’. Wordsworth, having seen that France was engaged in renovating human nature and political institutions, went back to France for his post-graduation ‘gap year’ from

Lyrical Ballads 

November 1791 to December 1792. He visited Paris at the start and finish of this period, where he may have lodged with one of the revolution leaders, Gorsas, and lived mostly in Orleans and in Blois, where he had two formative relationships. The first, a friendship with a future General of the French Revolutionary Armies, Michel Beaupuy, converted him to radical politics. The second, a love affair with Annette Vallon (whose family was staunchly Royalist) left him with an illegitimate daughter, Caroline, and a real crisis of conscience—in fact three crises of conscience. First, he was emotionally tied to a Royalist family, whose members suffered much at the hands of functionaries of the revolution, which Wordsworth supported. Second, he had to return home in December 1792—before Caroline was born—in order to make arrangements to marry Annette, and while he was at home Britain declared war on France, making return impossible. (He did not see his daughter until 1802, during the peace of Amiens, by when his purpose was to square things with Annette so as to marry Mary Hutchinson). Third, he spent the years from 1792 to at least 1799 deeply estranged from his own country. He describes himself sitting in country churches in 1793 praying for the defeat of British forces in their encounters with the French. There is a highly romantic story, which has never been confirmed (and cannot be disproved), that in October 1793 Wordsworth did in fact manage a secret return to France, in an attempt to see Annette, and that he got as far as Paris where on October 7th he may have witnessed one of Robespierre’s first executions of Girondin leaders. The legend is based on Thomas Carlyle’s (possibly faulty) recollection that Wordsworth claimed to have known Gorsas (he may have lodged in the same house in Paris in 1792) and (though this is less likely) witnessed his execution. What we do know about that year is that he made a solitary journey across Salisbury Plain in August 1793 on his way to stay with Jones in North Wales (he made use of this experience in numerous poems including ‘The Female Vagrant’); watched the British war fleet gathering near the Isle of Wight, visited Tintern Abbey and Goodrich  Kenneth Johnston’s treatment of this issue in The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998) makes two telling points. Wordsworth seems to have believed that his friend Michael Beaupuy died fighting counter-revolutionaries in 1793. He didn’t, in fact, but at the time of Wordsworth’s supposed visit there were rumours in France to that effect—rumours which were never published in England and which (Johnston persuasively argues) he could only have heard if he had been in France at that time. There are also passages in The Prelude about fugitives from the French authorities sleeping in fields and ditches which don’t have much to do with Wordsworth’s known experience but do seem to have the ring of truth. If he did make such a journey, it would have been highly dangerous as all foreigners were at that time banned. He could not have travelled by public roads, since they were constantly watched and he could have had no valid papers.

Lyrical Ballads 10

Castle (where he met the little girl he writes about in ‘We are seven’) and that none of his biographers know where he was for a six week period in September / October 1793. We also know that while in France, and afterwards, he read what he called ‘the master pamphlets of the day’, and came close to participating in the war of words. 1793 was the year of his unpublished radical pamphlet A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, in which Wordsworth justified regicide and revolutionary violence and made it clear from his arguments and phraseology that he was a convinced follower of the principles of Tom Paine, the most successful radical propagandist of the age, and the most eloquent voice in The Revolution Debate in England. For a while in 1794 he contemplated taking part in radical journalism, and he may even have done so in 1795 during his time in London. If so, he may have become disillusioned by what, in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’, he called ‘evil tongues / Rash judgments, …the sneers of selfish men / [and] greetings where no kindness is.’ 1.4 Towards Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were reunited in Keswick, in the Lake District, in April 1794, where Wordsworth spent the time revising one of his first published poems, ‘An Evening Walk’ (he had also published a poem based on his continental tour with Jones, called Descriptive Sketches). Towards the end of 1794 Wordsworth spent his time in Penrith, nursing a friend called Raisley Calvert, who died early in 1795. As an admirer of Wordsworth’s literary powers, Calvert left him a legacy of £900—a generous legacy designed, Wordsworth told his brother, ‘to secure me from want, if not to render me independent’. Wordsworth then spent part of the year in London, mixing in radical circles, including the philosophical anarchist William Godwin (he called on Godwin seven or eight times in February March and April of that year). In September 1795, he and Dorothy moved to Racedown in Dorset, where they were visited by Coleridge in June 1797. This momentous meeting between two young poets began one of the most productive of literary partnerships. The Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden in Somerset the next month, in July 1797 to enjoy the company of Coleridge. They were visited there by the celebrated political orator, John Thelwall, also a very capable poet, and by August the stream of suspicious visitors to Alfoxden house had attracted the attention of a government spy. A year later, Wordsworth completed ‘Tintern Abbey’, and paid a return visit to John Thelwall.

Lyrical Ballads 11

Lyrical Ballads, a joint venture between Wordsworth and Coleridge, was published in September 1798. In Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge recalled later, there was adivision of labouthis task was to attend to subjects in part at least supernatural, and Wordsworth’s to focus on human affections and the poetry of the everyday. , and the Wordsworths and Coleridge set off to Germany that month for a winter in Goslar and Göttingen. There Wordsworth experienced the coldest winter of the century. He was thrown back on memory and wrote some remarkably introspective poetry which became the first instalment of his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, and some wonderful lyrics, including the Lucy Poems. On their return to England in 1799 Wordsworth and Dorothy set up home in Dove Cottage Grasmere, now a literary shrine, with an excellent museum and library, and Wordsworth immediately set about writing four kinds of poem: meditative blank verse, which was intended to form part of a philosophical epic poem in three parts to be called The Recluse; lengthy pastoral narratives, such as ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’; numerous shorter lyrics; and some ‘poems on the naming of places’, which found their way into volume 2 of Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1800. By then the first volume of Lyrical Ballads had become well-known. In some ways Wordsworth and Coleridge had deliberately written in already popular modes—the late eighteenth century saw a considerable revival of interest in traditional ballad forms, the magazines were full of poems drawing attention to social issues, and this was also an age in which propaganda was conducted through broadsides in verse. Nevertheless, the combination of daringly simple language and disturbingly radical sympathies made the volume notorious in some quarters. Wordsworth wrote a powerful defence of the theory on which his poetry was based, in the 1800 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, expanding this in 1802 to include an even stronger defence of his abandonment of ‘Poetic Diction’. 1.5 Historical Contexts & Cultural Issues Revolution and Experiment The formative events of the era in which Wordsworth grew up were America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, the French Revolution, which began with the Fall of the Bastille in 1789, and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Ideologically, the first of these events was in some ways the most important. The loss of America, thanks largely to the intransigence of George III and some of his ministers, brought into focus what many in Britain regarded as the corruption of the so-called ‘Revolution

Lyrical Ballads 12

Settlement’ of 1688. Many in Britain took precisely the same view of the shortcomings of the British government that was taken in America. The debate over American secession (and what kind of transatlantic Commonwealth might have evolved from wiser counsels) engaged some of the great orators and pamphleteers of the age, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in America, Tom Paine, Edmund Burke and John Cartwright in England. The arguments of 1776 set the terms of debate at the time of the French Revolution, just thirteen years later, and indeed remained a permanent part of the radical agenda in Britain right through until the Chartist agitations in the 1840s.

In this cartoon, ‘The Plum Pudding in Danger’ James Gillray depicts the world being carved up between British and French Imperialism, represented by Prime Minister Pitt (left) and Napoleon.

The revolution era was also an era of immense change in science and industry. The poets were excited by the discoveries of Benjamin Franklin in electricity, and Joseph Priestley in chemistry, and the radical ideas promulgated by these and other scientists at a time when political radicalism, literary experiment and scientific experiment seemed to belong together. They were all products of ‘The Age of Reason’ when rational enquiry was replacing dogmas and traditional ideas in all areas of human

Lyrical Ballads 13

enquiry. The friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge included Humphrey Davy (the chemist), James Watt (the engineer), the Wedgwood potting family (who generously sponsored Coleridge so that he could concentrate in writing), and leading minds in mathematics and medicine. Coleridge studied several branches of contemporary science in Germany, alongside the Nature philosophy of Friedrich Schelling and the ethical inquiries of Immanuel Kant. At the same time, the poets recognized some of human consequences of industrialization, such as the collapse of traditional forms of agriculture, a variety of threats to rural life, and, in the early years of the 19th Century, the massive growth of populations in crowded and unsanitary cities. Romanticism I have already referred to Wordsworth as a ‘Romantic poet’. Some modern critics have challenged the idea that this is a very useful term, beyond indicating an approximate period, between roughly 1789 and 1830. But many scholars have felt that writers like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats in England, and similar ‘schools’ throughout Europe and eventually America, did have certain concepts and values in common. For instance, Rene Wellek (in ‘Romanticism Reexamined’, Concepts of Criticism [Yale University Press, 1963]) claimed that the key ideas of Romanticism were organicism, imagination and symbolism. By organicism Wellek means the recognition of the ecological relationship of all living processes - whether that of photosynthesis or that of imaginative creativity, and the assumption of a continuum between human and biological reality. The Romantics were the first generation to see mankind as part of nature rather than lords of creation. By imagination he means the delight in the creative role of the mind in creating its own world picture, as well as particular works of art. By symbolism he refers to the aesthetic manifestation of this sense of relationship between different orders, so that the divine or transcendental can be apprehended through the human and the natural. And although one could not demonstrate that all the Romantic poets shared a common view of each of these terms, they do seem to belong to a common vocabulary. One weakness of Wellek’s approach is that it leaves out the ethical and social implications of Romanticism. To William Hazlitt, it would not have seemed possible to consider Lyrical Ballads, or any of the poets of his age, the poets of his age without reference to the idea of revolution (as in the first paragraph on page 4 of this book). One reason for this is the obvious ‘levelling’ impulse in the language of Lyrical Ballads, and the conscious decision to imitate the verse of the people, by using traditional folk materials, as collected in anthologies of traditional ballads, or as

Lyrical Ballads 14

practised by Robert Burns. The most famous of these collections was Thomas Percy’s three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [1765], which Wordsworth much admired, and to some extent imitated (his poem ‘The Mad Mother’ is based in part on ‘Lady Bothwell’s Lament’, in Percy’s edition). Click here for a checklist of other Romantic concepts. 1.6 Recurring Themes in Wordsworth’s Poetry Nature The poet of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The Two-Part Prelude’ is indelibly associated with love of Nature. What Wordsworth believed about Nature is perhaps best expressed in his own poems, the lyrics in Lyrical Ballads, ‘To my Sister’, ‘Lines written in Early Spring’, ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’, and of course ‘Tintern Abbey’. Wordsworth more than nay other Romantic poet is associated with the idea that human life is at its most sane and healthy when lived close to nature; that we are part of nature, and our emotions and thoughts are interwoven with the scenes we grow up among; that children should learn from nature directly, rather than from pictures upon walls; that the confinement of young people in factories and the accumulation of men and women in cities is destructive. Together with Coleridge he developed, around the time of Lyrical Ballads, a belief that we all share with all living things, ‘one life, within us and abroad’, and his thought on this can be compared with Ralph Waldo’s Emerson’s concept of ‘The Oversoul’. His impact on the American writers who promoted the same ideas (Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman) and upon American educational reformers (such as W. E. Channing and Elizabeth Peabody) was incalculable. Some believe that Emerson’s famous book Nature, which was the founding document of American Transcendentalism, is essentially an exposition of Wordsworth’s view of Nature (as developed in ‘Tintern Abbey’, the lyrics, and The Excursion) in the form of prose argument. Wordsworth did not invent Romantic Nature in a vacuum. Many writers of Wordsworth’s age believed that everything in nature (including rocks) was alive. Many were Pantheists (believing that God was everywhere and everything, and in everything; that God was simply the name we give to the sum total of all things). Some believed that each form of being has its own sentience and sensibility, and that human beings have a duty to reverence every ‘living thing’. Many, including Joseph

Lyrical Ballads 15

Priestley, who wrote on theology as well as science, and whose ideas Wordsworth admired, doubted whether there was really any difference between matter and spirit. At the time he wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth may even have believed, with the French materialist Baron d’Holbach, that ‘God’ is a word people use to express either their idea of the sum total of all things, or an imaginary being who would combine all of their ideals and aspirations. In the second generation of Romantic poets Wordsworth is responsible for inspiring John Keats to feel that nothing makes poets write but ‘the fair paradise of Nature’s light’; for making Shelley respond as he did to the unseen presence of ‘The West Wind’ and the symbolic power of Mont Blanc; and for the fact that Lord Byron—a citydwelling socialite—devoted Canto 3 and 4 of Childe Harold to eloquent rhapsodies celebrating the interaction of nature and the human mind and describing the hum of human cities (which, in reality, he loved) as ‘torture’. Childhood & Education The Romantic poets may be said to have invented childhood. At around the same time William Blake (in Songs of Innocence and of Experience) and Wordsworth (in Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude) put the experience of children – their perceptions, their victimization, their vulnerability and their freedom of thought and behaviour—at the centre of poetry. Child-centred education was invented in this period, by educational reformers such as Rousseau in France, Pestalozzi in Switzerland, and Froebel, and the next generation of novelists—Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Dickens—produced many novels in which the experience of children, or the upbringing of the hero or heroine is, for the first time, regarded as crucially important. England has its fair share of writers about educational theory, and both Wordsworth and Coleridge took a close interest in rival schemes for extending a reasonable share of education among the children of the new working class. ‘The child is father of the man’, Wordsworth wrote, in a famous paradox, ‘and I would wish my days to be / Bound each to each in natural piety.’ These lines were well known because they were part of a lyric usually printed before one of his most famous poems, the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, in which he said of human infancy that ‘trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God who is our home’ and spoke of the child as gifted with insights that we spend the rest of our lives toiling to recover. In the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which develops many Romantic insights, the child is described as ‘a self-propelling wheel, a sacred Yes!’ It is fair to say that the Romantics took an evolutionary view of human existence, and they grasped that each

Lyrical Ballads 16

new-born child might well belong to a new stage of human development, gifted with higher attributes than any that had come before. The Human Mind A full preface to this collection, Wordsworth says, would have included an account of revolutions in society, which would have involved in turn an examination of ‘in what manner language and the human mind react on each other’. In the preamble to his long poem The Excursion he referred to the human mind as ‘the haunt and main region of my song’. The poems in Lyrical Ballads interrogate memory, the psychological effects of displacement and loss of livelihood, the power of hypnosis or autosuggestion, a child’s daily play with her dead and absent siblings, the negotiations between a boy’s sense of place and his father’s, ‘the windings of maternal feeling at the point of death’ or in mental alienation, the endurance of huge disappointment, the experience of bereavement, and so forth. (Note: you might find it useful to expand this list of psychological themes.) Can you find a poem in Lyrical Ballads which is not exploring some aspect of psychology? Would it surprise you at all to be told that his next big project after Lyrical Ballads—The Prelude—is an inquisition into the growth of his own mind? Perception Wordsworth’s immediate precursors and contemporaries in philosophy and science were fascinated by the problem of how, if mind was not material, it could perceive things that were material. Our senses are obviously material, composed of flesh and nerves, but how do our senses communicate ideas to our supposedly immaterial intelligence? They don’t use words, but the auditory and visual images and other sense signals constitute a kind of language. As philosophers like Bishop Berkeley and Immanuel Kant have argued, our minds cannot know things themselves: we perceive through an intermediate language, including colours (which are either properties of light and the eye rather than of bananas or water) shapes (which are part of our way of understanding space) and the evidence of scent and touch, which must be part-created by our nerves. Something like this, it seems safe to assume, is what Wordsworth has in mind when he talks in Tintern Abbey of that mysterious ‘language of the sense’. Wordsworth himself says that the senses ‘colour, model and combine / The things perceived’ and that being so creative they ‘we may say ‘ that these faculties are both ‘the mind and the mind’s minister’.

Lyrical Ballads 17

Imagination. For some eighteenth-century minds, Imagination was a disease from which poets were prone to suffer: something very close to fantasy. For others it was simply the faculty of forming images: the more imaginative you were, the more distinctly you could remember or draw something that was not present to you. The Romantics jettisoned both of these contradictory ideas—the idea of imagination as simply another word for either memory or fantasy. They made it the central mental power—basic to all perception, intuition, empathy, speculative thought, love, friendship, and of course creativity. In Chapter 4 of Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge recollects hearing Wordsworth read his poem ‘The Female Vagrant’. What struck him, he says, was not merely ‘the freedom from false taste’: It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.

Here, Imagination seems to be involved in defamiliarizing things, so that we see them (a) as if for the first time, and (b) as if they were symbolic rather than mere objects. Later in Biographia he defined two stages of imagination. Primary Imagination he said is ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception’ and ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. In other words, all human perception of God’s creation involves primary or first stage imagination. To the Romantics there is no such thing as ‘mere perception’ because the mind is creative in all its acts. Secondary Imagination, which is the kind of imagination used by writers, artists, scientists and legislators—anyone engaged in conceiving new works or new theories or new hypotheses—is ‘an echo’ of Primary Imagination. ‘It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.’ That is, the artist of statesman is echoing God’s creation by creating new forms or ideas out of chaos. (there is a hint in the word ‘echo’ of a sort of ‘big bang’ theory of creation). . These famous definitions are, unfortunately, among the least immediately intelligible of the statements about Imagination in the Romantic period, and it is only

Lyrical Ballads 18

when Coleridge speaks of imagination as ‘the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being’ (in his ‘Essay on Education’) that he really touches on the centrality of Imagination to the Romantic view of human life. In this broader sense, also, he speaks in his early political lectures of Robespierre as a man of Imagination – someone capable of conceiving human life as it might be rather than as it is. All the Romantic poets, except Byron, made high claims for Imagination. For William Blake the ‘Poetic Genius’, which is in all of us, is ‘the true man’. Without our poetic genius we would be condemned to endlessly repeating the same ideas, and incapable of progression. Wordsworth defines Imagination in Book 14 of The Prelude as ‘clearest insight, amplitude of mind,/ and Reason in her most exalted mood’. Elsewhere, Wordsworth says (according to Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary for 11 September 1816) that ‘imagination is the faculty by which the poet conceives and produces – that is, images [as a verb] – individual forms in which are embodied universal ideas or abstractions.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, in speaking of Imagination in his ‘Defence of Poetry’, gives an immensely eloquent account of imagination in its moral dimension. For him, because imagination enabled the individual to put himself in the place of others, making their own pleasures and pains his own, Imagination was ‘the great instrument of moral good’. Keats went even further, claiming in a letter of 1817 that ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not’. If the imagination tells you that we live in a living universe, we do: even if it takes environmental sciences another hundred and fifty years to explain what that means. Imagination can make itself felt in a single word. Wordsworth’s favourite example was his own line: ‘Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods’. ‘Broods’ is a one-word metaphor. It combines, Wordsworth himself said, ‘the manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs her soft notes, as if herself delighting to listen to it’, with the idea of ‘a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from the continuous process of incubation’. But to ‘to brood’, your dictionary will tell you, also means to meditate. So Wordsworth’s use of the term simultaneously describes the sounds of the dove in their rounded perfection, the warmth and softness of the bird herself, and makes the whole incubation image a metaphor for the poet’s own meditation. Of course Imagination, if it means seeing things as they might be, rather than as they are, can have serious human consequences, and Wordsworth seems to have been acutely conscious of this fact. In ‘The Thorn’ and ‘Old man travelling’ he explores the perils of imaginative construction of reality.

Lyrical Ballads 19

Memory & Time One very obvious theme in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is memory, particularly is it relates to a sense of identity: in the first two sections of this poem Wordsworth depicts himself looking at an unchanging landscape using it to measure the difference between himself in 1793 and himself in 1798. In The Prelude he used a memorable paradox, ‘spots of time’ to talk about the way moments in one’s past can exist like islands in the flow of one’s experience—places one can endlessly revisit to recharge one’s batteries. He spoke of these ‘spots’ as ‘hiding places’ of our power. Human Liberty Two poems in Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge’s ‘The Dungeon’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Convict’) deal directly with the idea of imprisonment, and the impossibility of human reformation in confinement. One reason for this focus is that the Romantics were very much interested in ideas of justice. William Blake said that ‘Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of religion’. And William Godwin’s Political Justice taught them to be aware of the extent to which concepts of crime tend to favour the defence of property, and be in the interest of the rich rather than of those whose only possession is their labour. Another is that the Fall of the Bastille brought everyone’s attention to the abuse of power by the aristocracy in many countries, and by such infamous organs as the Spanish Inquisition. Among the great treatments of this theme in the period are the chorus of prisoners in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, emerging from their cells into the open air; Goya’s paintings of interrogations by the Spanish Inquisition; and Byron’s poem ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’. But for Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley human liberty meant a lot more than not being in prison. For Blake it meant freedom from slavery and economic exploitation. For Shelley it meant free love and free thinking. For all of them it meant liberty of mind and conscience. Human Suffering Wordsworth’s early poetry is overtly concerned with all aspects of human suffering. You should go through the poems in Lyrical Ballads noting where and how his poems depict poverty, weakness, illness, madness, bereavement, unemployment, desertion (especially deserted women), homelessness, vagrancy. How many of these victims suffer from natural causes? How many are caused by the ills of society? One consistent theme in Wordsworth’s work, from the 1790s through the 1840s, is his belief

Lyrical Ballads  20

that the social contract required the state to educate its citizens, and to provide for the poor, a belief he outlined in a late essay (entitled ‘Postscript, 1835’). His perceptiveness on aspects of the poverty trap, for instance when people cannot afford the candlelight necessary to earn a living from weaving, or have to sell their means of livelihood merely to live, comes out in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ and ‘The last of the Flock’. A similar point is made in James Gillray’s 1795 cartoon called ‘The British Butcher’ in which the butcher has the face of Prime Minister William Pitt. Only Wordsworth could write a poem to a wild flower, regretting ‘its necessity in being old’. Even as a young man, he seemed surprisingly drawn to portraits of human beings struggling with the weakness of age or demonstrating extraordinary hardihood. Within Lyrical Ballads, note ‘Goody Blake’, ‘Simon Lee’, ‘Old man travelling’, and ‘Michael’. Similarly, ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman’, ‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘Old Man travelling’, in the 1798 volume, are directly concerned with the loss, or imminent loss, of loved ones. The new poems for the 1800 volume are dominated by this theme: the Lucy poems (in which the poet imagines losing a loved one, who is sometimes a lover, sometimes a woman, sometimes a child); the Matthew poems (in which Matthew is admired for the fortitude with he faces the loss of his daughter); ‘Michael’, who loses a son; and ‘The Brothers’, in which a sea-faring brother returns to his home to learn—quietly, while concealing his own identity from his informant, a new village priest—of the death of his brother. Death is perhaps Wordsworth’s major theme. His most impressive schoolboy poem, written at the age of 16, is a sonnet imagining the grief of a widower. The most harrowing sonnet Wordsworth ever wrote, ‘Surprised by Joy’ (1813–14) concerned the loss of his own daughter Catherine in 1812. Wordsworth is one of the great poets of death; in part, no doubt, because of the early loss of both mother and father, and in part because he was unusually aware of the illusion of immortality that most of us have as children, and the extreme difficulty we all have in imagining death (even when we have witnessed it in others) as something applicable to ourselves. National Independence and Liberty Perhaps the only poem in Lyrical Ballads in which this is a conscious theme is ‘The Female Vagrant’, whose sufferings come about as a result of England’s war against American independence. But in the years 1802–1815 Wordsworth went on to write some seventy poems (mostly sonnets) lamenting the fate of Switzerland, Venice, Spain and Portugal (at the hands of Napoleon) and praising an assortment of heroes in the Tyrol and the Iberian peninsula. His political sonnets also express a sense of

Lyrical Ballads  21

patriotism based on belonging to the nation of John Milton and the heroes of the 17th Century Republican tradition—Sidney, Harrington, Vane—who helped shape the ideals of both the American and the French Revolutions. When he re-published ‘The Female Vagrant’ as part of ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ in 1842 Wordsworth wrote: The American War was still fresh in memory. The struggle [with France] which was beginning, and which many thought would be brought to a speedy close by the irresistible arms of Great Britain being added to those of the Allies, I was assured in my own mind would be of long continuance and productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation. This conviction was pressed upon me by having been a witness, during a long residence in revolutionary France, of the spirit which prevailed in that country’. (PW, 1, 94-95).

Wordsworth’s Politics There is little to suggest that prior to his residence in France Wordsworth was especially political, but he always believed that having been brought up in the Lake District he had never seen one man show deference to another on class grounds until he went to Cambridge. His own practice of walking everywhere instead of riding in stage coach brought him into regular contact with working and unemployed people, and he does seem to have got involved in conversation with such people in a remarkably open way—it is hard to think of another writer of that date, or since, who would cheerfully share a bale of hay with a tramp, as his mode of accommodation while travelling. He absorbed republican principles both from Michel Beaupuy and from the republican library of the Pinney family, whose house in Dorset he borrowed in 1795. So by 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads, he had added a grasp of republican theory and principles to what was already a very democratic character structure. Opinions vary as to when Wordsworth recanted his support for France. Some would date it as happening in 1798, on France’s invasion of Switzerland. Others see it as not complete until 1805 when Napoleon had himself promoted from Consul to Emperor. Certainly when he was completing the first full-length version of the Prelude in 1805 Wordsworth compared Napoleon’s coronation by the Pope to ‘a dog returning to its vomit’. Others have argued that although he thought of himself as a patriot, i.e. a supporter of the rights of the common people, his principles were really Burkean at a very early date. Until Edmund Burke came out in condemnation of  By ‘Burkean’ I mean based on, or aligned with, the thinking of Edmund Burke. Burke made his reputation as a famous liberal parliamentarian, supporting liberal causes, but because he opposed the French Revolution his name is now synonymous with conservatism.

Lyrical Ballads  22

the French Revolution he himself had been seen as a champion of liberty (especially America’s) and cultural diversity and integrity (especially India’s). Burke was almost alone, among men of radical reputation, in condemning events in France at a very early date, and he certainly lost sight of his liberalism when he supported the use of state power against government critics, such as John Thelwall and others who were imprisoned for ‘constructive treason’, but his basic criticism of France was that it had failed to grasp what kind of constitution a stable republican government required. Within a few years many came around to that opinion. The moral, perhaps, is that it is wise to avoid such blanket terms as radical or conservative when discussing Romantic politics, and to focus on the content of belief. In middle age, around the time of the Battle of Waterloo, Wordsworth himself became so obsessed with the failure of the Whigs to oppose Napoleon’s imperial ambitions that he automatically opposed anything they favoured. Perhaps. Also, he became so guilt-ridden about having condoned Robespierre’s terror in his twenties, that he became suspicious of any radical political proposals as likely to make things worse rather than better. Politically, he was divided. In 1818 he shocked his admirers by supporting Tory interests, backing the Tory Lord Lonsdale against the Whig candidate Henry Brougham, and he argued against the Reform Bill of 1832 (which extended the electoral franchise to adult male property-holders), because he feared what would happen if Parliament became dominated by demagogues, urged on by the mob. Once mob rule took hold, he felt, London would become like Paris in the 1790s, and constitutional liberties would be lost for a life-time. Yet in his long poem The Excursion, and in essays and poems of the 1830s and 1840s, he wrote passionately in favour of welfare and social benefits for the poor, and the necessity of free education.

 Maximilien Robespierre was the revolutionary leader whose single-mindedness in pursuit of his political ideals led to the Great Terror in which he executed thousands of his opponents. Even so, some in Wordsworth’s circle in Somerset thought of Robespierre as ‘a ministering angel of mercy, sent to slay thousands that he might liberate millions’.

Part 2: Literary Strategies 2.1 Wordsworth’s Variety This Insight deals only with Wordsworth’s contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, but this already includes a considerable poetic variety of poetic practice. In Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth never uses the same stanza form, or the same narrative mode, more than twice. Before Lyrical Ballads he had published two rather conventional descriptive poems (Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk), written a tragedy (The Borderers), and completed a complex poem of social protest called Salisbury Plain, and a blank verse tale called The Ruined Cottage. If he had published the last two of these along with Lyrical Ballads in 1798 it would have been the most varied and accomplished debut of any poet in any period. Within months of publishing Lyrical Ballads he had started the earliest version of his autobiographical poem The Prelude (one of the two or three greatest and most original poems of the nineteenth century, not published until 1850, alongside Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Whitman’s Song of Myself, published five years later). In Poems in Two Volumes (1807) he wrote in more modes and forms than any poet since the seventeenth century. Elsewhere such poems as ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (1795-7), Peter Bell (1798) ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802), the political sonnets of 1802-3, The ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’ (1804), ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (1805), The Prelude (1805/1850) or ‘The Two-Part Prelude’ (1799) and The White Doe (1815) represent enormous investments in originality. You could easily devote a term’s study to Wordsworth and be doing something quite different every week. 2.2 What is a ‘lyrical ballad’? Wordsworth’s first readers may have been puzzled by the title of the volume: Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems. The phrase ‘lyrical ballads’ combines two terms, neither of which communicates anything very fixed. A ‘lyric’, as its derivation from ‘lyre’ suggests, and as modern usage still implies, is likely to be sung. A ballad may also, in some usages, imply a musical composition, but is most likely to imply some-

Lyrical Ballads  24

thing told. A lyric tends to imply the expression of emotion; a ballad may concern emotionally moving subject matter, but above all it promises the narration of a story. So the title of the volume is slightly teasing and paradoxical. For some modern critics this draws attention to the fact that one consistent feature of the poems in the volume is their tendency to do something a little different—often a little more demanding of the reader—than poems of their apparent genre tend to do. Knowing what kind of poem one is reading makes one lazy; one’s responses are partly pre-determined by knowing—say—that this is Gothic, and will seek to frighten; this is a lyric, and will soothe; this is comic, that is serious, and so forth. Working through the table of contents does not, initially, help to resolve this difficulty. The volume opens with an extended ballad by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is certainly based on traditional ballad metre, but is vastly longer than any traditional ballad, and not obviously ‘lyrical’. The next poem, again by Coleridge, is called a ‘tale’ but appears to be a fragment of drama (in blank verse dialogue) rather than a lyric or a ballad. Poetic Metre Wordsworth’s first piece in the volume is another piece of blank verse, in an eighteenth century genre of poetry known as an ‘inscription’, that is, it purports to have been ‘left’ at a particular spot in the countryside as if inscribed there. The fourth, again by Coleridge, is a blank verse meditation in a genre he had just invented, the so-called ‘conversation poem’ (it is subtitled ‘a conversational poem’, meaning that its tone is conversational, and the speaker is a relationship with other people whose presence is a factor in the poem, though there is only one speaker—as was often the case in Coleridge’s reallife ‘conversations’). The fifth, by Wordsworth, is a lengthy first-person narrative in Spenserian stanzas (defined later), an intricate form far from the simplicity of folk ballad. The sixth, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ is in ballad mode though not in true ballad stanza. The seventh, with the simple title ‘Lines’ (but an astonishingly circumstantial subtitle ‘written at a small distance from my house and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed’) is written in ballad stanza, but turns out to be the most lyrical poem in the volume so far: it offers a rhapsody to Spring. Perhaps this, at last, is truly a ‘lyrical ballad’? Almost the only certainty about  Traditional ballad stanza consists of alternating lines of tetrameter (lines with four ‘feet’) and trimeter (three feet), rhyming abcb (i.e. the first and third lines don’t have to rhyme). To take an example from Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’: ‘The sun / now rose / upon / the right: // Out of / the sea / came he,// Still hid / in mist, / and on / the left // Went down / into / the sea.’ Each ‘foot’, or unit of meter, has one stressed syllable (italicized here) and (normally) one unstressed syllable. But there may be two unstressed syllables, as in the second and third of these lines: ‘It is /an An/cient Ma/riner // And he stop/peth one / of three. // By thy long /grey beard / and glit/tering eye, // Now where/fore stopp’st thou me?’. See Poetic Metre.

Lyrical Ballads  25

the volume’s title is that the six poems in blank verse, and possibly the lengthy one in Spenserian stanza, must be among the ‘few other poems’ which are not claimed to be lyrics, or ballads, or even lyrical ballads. Wordsworth’s one clarifying comment on one implication of the phrase ‘lyrical ballads’ did not appear until the 1800 ‘Preface’. He says that one ‘circumstance’ which ‘distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day’ is that ‘the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling’. In other words, even in those poems which appear to be concerned with incident, anecdote or narrative, the poet’s focus is upon the life of feelings, and as he comments elsewhere, on ‘the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature’. Those ‘great and simple affections’, or ‘primary laws of our human nature’, he says elsewhere in the Preface, include such universals as the love of family, or the fear of death. The table of contents of the 1798 volume was as follows (Coleridge’s four contributions are asterisked; other poems not discussed in this Insight are marked†) The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere* The Foster-Mother’s Tale* Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem* The Female Vagrant Goody Blake and Harry Gill Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed Simon Lee, the old Huntsman Anecdote for Fathers We are seven Lines written in early spring The Thorn The Last of the Flock The Dungeon* The Mad Mother The Idiot Boy Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening† Expostulation and Reply The Tables Turned; an Evening Scene, on the same subject Old Man travelling

Lyrical Ballads  26

The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman The Convict† Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey

Later editions of Lyrical Ballads, in 1800 and 1802 and 1805, added such poems as ‘Hart-leap Well’, the Lucy Poems, and the Matthew Poems, all of which might be regarded as genuine lyrical ballads, and ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’, lengthy pastoral poems in blank verse. 2.3 The ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads The advertisement is a strangely edgy piece of writing. First it claims that, whatever critics may suppose, the materials of poetry can be found not just in conventional poetic subjects but in ‘every subject that can interest the human mind’. Next, that the majority of the following poems ‘’were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure’. Wordsworth is forewarning his readers that they may find themselves displeased with the language of the poems, and even wondering ‘by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title’ [the title of poetry]. But as Charles Lamb insisted, the themes of Lyrical Ballads were not chosen to experiment with poetical adaptation of ‘the language of conversation in the lower and middle classes of society’: they sprang ‘from living and daily circumstances’. Throughout the nineties, Wordsworth’s imagination had been almost wholly preoccupied by images of distress, and he was deeply sceptical about the will or the power of society to radically amend the human condition unless a fundamental shift in imaginative sympathy could first be engineered. The ‘Advertisement’ does in fact approach this point rather indirectly. He asks the reader to test the books by asking ‘if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. If it does, he suggests in a memorable sentence: ‘They should be consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision’. Edgily, and rather arrogantly, he goes on to spoil this elegant point. He adds that although it would be ridiculous to discourage readers from making their own judgments, nevertheless, if they have not spent much time reading poetry, especially perhaps ‘our elder writers’, they should allow that their judgement may be erroneous. On the one hand the experienced reader may be too prejudiced to enjoy poetry written on new

Lyrical Ballads  27

principles; on the other, a reader with insufficient practice may be an incompetent judge. He is clearly so uneasy about how this volume will be received that he is preparing himself (in a phrase first used by John Milton) to be content with a ‘fit audience, though few’. The fact is that Wordsworth in 1798 was thoroughly alienated from the monied classes for whom he was writing. He had back in England for six years after his experience of revolutionary France. Part of this time had been spent in long walks through a land which, if one judges from the poems in Lyrical Ballads and others written at the time, was inhabited mainly by victims of scarcity and war, many of whom seem to have been deserted mothers. He had spent the last year in the radical company of Coleridge, and their friends Tom Poole and (occasionally) the political agitator John Thelwall. In The Prelude he reflected on what he learned from his vagrant existence, and upon the ideology of publishing: —Yes, in those wanderings deeply did I feel How we mislead each other; above all, How books mislead us, seeking their reward From judgements of the wealthy Few, who see By artificial lights; how they debase The Many for the pleasure of those Few. (1850, 13: 206ff)

One poem of the period which Wordsworth did not include in any edition of Lyrical Ballads, though it appeared in the Morning Post, was called ‘The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale’. It began with a vituperative assessment of ‘the wealthy Few’: ’Tis not for the unfeeling, the falsely refined, The squeamish in taste, and the narrow of mind, And the small critic wielding his delicate pen, That I sing of old Adam, the pride of old men.

The vehemence reveals a man deeply conscious of the ideology of publishing, and troubled by the realization that he was writing about people whose circumstances resulted from the acts of those for whom he was writing. His characters are the dispossessed and the settled poor of the still late-feudal society of Dorset and Somerset, whose tenant he then was. The landlords and the ‘poetry owners’ were the same people, and Wordsworth’s radical temper found the fact acutely painful.

Lyrical Ballads  28

2.4 The 1800 ‘Preface’ While the 1800 Preface, compared with ‘The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale’, is a relatively mannerly composition, its latent aggression is worth noting. The poet wishes to trace in incidents of common life ‘the primary laws of our nature’, choosing common life because there ‘the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity’. The human mind is ‘capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants’. His aim is to ‘produce or enlarge this capability’. His work is a modest attempt to counteract the public’s ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’. And he wishes to keep the reader ‘in the company of flesh and blood’. He therefore expects his poems to be read with ‘more than common dislike’ by an audience which prefers its literature to be ‘frantic … sickly and stupid … idle and extravagant’. Imploded in this crude fashion, the message of the Preface is plain enough. The ‘almost savage torpor’ into which the reading public has sunk, calls for treatment, and Wordsworth’s poems are designed for medicinal effect. One of their aims is to gently bring the reader to face up to various prejudices, and with himself, or (as Wordsworth puts it in the Preface) with his own ‘preestablished codes of decision’ or ‘habits of association’. One of the means employed by Wordsworth is to present the reader with poems that seems to promise a particular kind of gratification—escapism or titillation for example—and then to do something quite different. For almost every poem in Lyrical Ballads, numerous models have been identified, and the term ‘parody’ is occasionally aired in connection with one poem or another. This is not to claim that such poems are openly parodic. But in each of Wordsworth’s poems in Lyrical Ballads the surface manner courts comparison, to begin with at least, with what his gentle reader—having laid out some portion of a guinea—feels entitled to expect. The 1800 Preface is, along with Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1591), Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821), Walt Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), and Ezra Pound’s imagist manifesto (1913), one of the major literary statements in the poetry of the last thousand years. Wordsworth’s critical ideas are reflected in many later documents, including Emerson’s Nature (1836) and ‘The American Scholar’ (1837), and Joseph Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) What follows are (to me) its key sentences, with some comments in green. If you want to quote them you will need to consult an appropriate text and locate the page number for your reference.

Lyrical Ballads  29

1. Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth says, was ‘published as an experiment … to ascertain how far by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort pleasure … may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavour to impart.’ Charles Lamb protested that the volume has a much deeper and more urgent purpose, to do with the defence of ordinary human life. In any case, Wordsworth seems to be drawing attention—rather dangerously to an aspect of the poetry critics would be least likely to approve of. 2. The preface is only a partial statement of the new poetics: ‘To treat the subject with the clearness and coherence, of which I believe it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which again would not be determined without pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and react on each other, and without retracing the revolutions not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself.’ There is a clear implication in this passage that public taste has been depraved; and an interesting hint of a theme in Wordsworth’s later literary criticism (and in other literary manifestoes), that the purpose of literature is to refresh and reform language, because if language becomes stale and corrupt, so will thought. 3. ‘It is supposed that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association’. By this Wordsworth seems to mean that buyers expect poets to treat only poetical subjects (not, for instance, unpoetical subjects such as Simon Lee’s swollen ankles). 4. ‘The principal object … was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate them or describe them … as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men … tracing in them, truly but not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature’. It is hard to think of an essay on Wordsworth in which it would not be appropriate to quote this statement and to comment on it. 5. ‘Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated … and because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.’ Coleridge argued against this passage in his Biographia Literaria, and many have taken issue with it. How would you defend or criticize it?

Lyrical Ballads  30

6. ‘The language, too, of these men is adopted [purified from real defects] because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because … being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings in simple and unelaborated expressions.’ The idea that language is ‘derived’ from ‘objects’ may seem naïve in the light of modern linguistics, but many writers, from Robert Lowth’s Lectures on Hebrew Poetry (1753) to Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature (1836) have developed this theme, making the point, among others, that many common expressions are far more pictorial than one thinks, and that language is like a coral reef, built up from dead metaphors, which once communicated vivid images. 7. ‘I have said that each of these poems has a purpose. … It is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature.’ [Wordsworth’s examples include]: maternal passion in The Idiot Boy and Mad Mother; ‘the last struggles of a human being, at the approach of death’; ‘the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion’; or—in Simon Lee for example—‘placing my reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them’. 8. ‘the feeling therein developed [i.e. in the poems] gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.’ i.e. even the ballads are not significant primarily for the plot! 9. ‘The human mind is capable of being stimulated without the application of gross and violent stimulants … and, … one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me that to endeavour to produce and enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes … [etc.]’. Could you think of a greater claim that could be made for literature than this? Do you feel that when you read, the author is enlarging your mental powers? 10 ‘I have wished to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him.’ There is a rather tactless implication here, you may feel, that most modern writing does not do this, and (maybe) a further implication that most readers are in fact quite happy to be fed with fantasy. 11. ‘There will be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it.’ This is a major declaration of war on poetic conventions. What he means by

Lyrical Ballads  31

‘poetic diction’ includes personifications of abstract ideas, hand-me-down descriptive phrases, and falsehood of description, etc - which he illustrates from a sonnet by Gray. For a full discussion see below (the Appendix on Poetic Diction) and Chapter 4. 12. ‘There neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition …’. This is another far-reaching claim, and one which Coleridge, who tended to favour a somewhat heightened language in poetry, was very uneasy with. Nevertheless, most poetry after Wordsworth has tended to accept this precept to some degree. 13. ‘What is a Poet? ... he is a man speaking to men’ (etc). The passage goes on to qualify this claim, somewhat, by enumerating the gifts of observation, feeling and expression that a poet may be expected to have in rather greater measure than most people. But the point is that poets are not from another planet, and they should address their readers on the ground of their shared feelings and experience. 14. ‘[In trying to imitate real life the poet] will wish to bring his feelings near to those of the persons he describes... even confound and identify his feelings with theirs.’ Coleridge, by and large, thought this degree of empathy with characters was inappropriate to lyric poetry. 15 ‘Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge…. The Poet … is the rock of defence of human nature, and upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him, relationship and love …. The poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time. [dealing with] whatever is manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.’ You may find this rather inflated, but it inspired Shelley, and the phrases I have italicized do, I think, express something very central to Wordsworth’s deeply serious sense of what poetry was for. 16 ‘I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins....’ Note that the second of these claims revises the first, rather impulsive one. Wordsworth is not saying that poetry doesn’t involve hard work. 17 ‘I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others.’—i.e. make up your own mind.

Lyrical Ballads  32

18 ‘All men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an honourable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them; we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.’ —i.e. ‘if you don’t like these poems, maybe it is time you changed your ideas’. You may well feel that these last two statements are slightly contradictory.

The Appendix on Poetic Diction In 1802 Wordsworth he added an Appendix developing his thoughts on what he meant by Poetic Diction. It is a lengthy argument, and perhaps its key passage is this: —The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect, without having the same animating passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of those figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and ideas with which they had no natural connection whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.

In other words, poetry has, in the course of time, ceased to be based on nature and real feelings, but has come to imitate other poetry; and as a result of imitating each other poets have come to write an exceedingly artificial language which has no connection with how people really speak, and little interest in depicting real experience. His examples of poetic diction, taken from Thomas Gray, include artificial word order and the use of florid expressions in place of the names of objects (‘reddening Phoebus’ meaning the sun, ‘amorous descant’ for birdsong). 2.5 Critical extracts from Wordsworth’s Letters To Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801 Fox was the leader of the Whigs in Parliament (Wordsworth later wrote a sonnet lamenting his death) and Wordsworth sent him a copy of Lyrical Ballads 1800 praising him as a man of sensibility, aware of people as individuals, and of the worth of ordinary men. He comments that ‘the present Rulers of this country’ ignore or disre-

Lyrical Ballads  33

gard the fact that as a result of such things as ‘workhouses, Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-Shops, etc superadded to the encreasing disproportion between the price of labour and that of the necessaries of life’ the bonds of domestic feeling among the poor …have been weakened and in innumerable instances entirely destroyed’. Then he writes: In the two poems ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ I have attempted to draw a picture of the domestic affections as I know they exist amongst a class of men who are now almost confined to the North of England. They are small independent proprietors of land here called statesmen, men of respectable education who daily labour on their own little properties. The domestic affections will always be strong amongst men who live in a country not crowded with population, if these men are placed above poverty. But if they are proprietors of small estates, which have descended tot hem from their ancestors, the power which these affections will acquire amongst such men is inconceivable by those who have only had an opportunity of observing hired labourers, farmers and the manufacturing Poor. Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written…. The two poems which I have mentioned were written to shew that men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply. … The poems are faithful copies from nature; and … may in some small degree enlarge our feelings of reverence for our species, and our knowledge of human nature, by shewing that our best qualities are possessed by men whom we are too apt to consider, not with reference to the points in which they resemble us, but to those in which they manifestly differ from us. I thought, at a time when these feelings are sapped in so many ways, that the two poems might co-operate, however feebly, with the illustrious efforts which you have made to stem this and other evils with which the country is labouring…

To John Wilson, 7 June 1802 In 1802 Wordsworth received a letter from a young admirer, which queried whether a poem like ‘The Idiot Boy’ could please. His reply included the following points: People in our rank in life are perpetually falling into one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that human nature and the persons they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we generally associate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, professional men, ladies, persons who can afford to buy or can easily procure books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed, and printed upon superfine paper. These persons are, it is true, a part of human nature, but we err lamentably if we

Lyrical Ballads  34

suppose them to be fair representatives of the vast mass of human existence. And yet few ever consider books but with reference to their power of pleasing these persons and men of a higher rank; few descend lower among cottages and fields and among children. A man must have done this habitually before his judgment upon the Idiot Boy would be in any way decisive with me.… You have given me praise for having reflected faithfully in my poems the feelings of human nature I would fain hope that I have done so. But a great Poet ought to do more than this he ought to a certain degree to rectify men’s feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of things. He ought to travel before men occasionally as well as at their sides. … It is not enough for me as a poet, to delineate merely such feelings as all men do sympathize with but, it is also highly desirable to add to these others, such as all men may sympathise with, and such as there is reason to believe they would be better and more moral beings if they did sympathize with.

To Sir Walter Scott, 7 November 1805 Wordsworth from an early age believed that he had one strength in particular, that of seeing nature more keenly and accurately than other poets, or keeping his eye on his object. He wrote to Scott that while he admired the seventeenth-century satirist John Dryden for his ear (meaning his sense of metre) he had no descriptive imagination: There is not a single image from Nature in the whole body of his works; and in his translation from Virgil whenever Virgil can be fairly said to have had his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage.

To Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807 It is very clear from the correspondence that while Wordsworth could be stung by adverse criticism, he nonetheless had great self-confidence. Lady Beaumont had been incensed by the critical reception of Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes (1807) and Wordsworth replied: Trouble not yourself upon their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny, to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore become more actively and securely vir-

Lyrical Ballads  35

tuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.

And later in the letter Never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.

Conclusion To summarize the implications of these passages, what can we expect when reading a Wordsworth poem? The first thing to observe is that Wordsworth’s commitment to an undecorated style is part of a generally radical stance. He engages with ordinary people, and ordinary life, rather than writing about the lives and thoughts of the refined. Secondly, whatever else may be thought of Wordsworth’s poetry, and his theory, his revolution in language did in fact change the course of poetry and of literature in general. Most poets abandoned florid poet diction. Some novelists of the midnineteenth century (such as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot) began to write about rural or working-class characters, and at the start of the twentieth century such novelists as Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence brought the language of narration closer to that of their characters. Thirdly, Wordsworth has an astonishingly serious conception of the value of poetry, and the way it can accomplish moral and intellectual shifts in its readers. It is the writer’s duty to ‘produce and enlarge’ the reader’s capacity for mental stimulation, and to ‘rectify men’s feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane pure and permanent’. In other word one is being challenged to think and to feel to feel differently in the process of reading, engaging actively with the poem rather than passively submitting to it, or expecting to be entertained without some participation in creating meaning. This ambitious conception of the value of literature certainly inspired the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the novelist George Eliot, and for such Victorian and later critics, such as Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis it became the justification for promoting the serious study of literature.

Part 3: Reading Lyrical Ballads 3.1. Poems of Childhood: ‘We are seven’ and ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ ‘We are seven’ is a good poem to start with, because it is a sort of litmus test for appreciation of Wordsworth’s procedure. In this poem an adult speaker is attempting to teach a pretty child the meaning of death, and much of the interest of the poem is in deciding whether that speaker is the poet, and whether we are invited to approve of what he says. It would certainly be widely assumed in the eighteenth century that children ought to learn from their elders, and that what they should learn includes a ‘Christian’ view of Heaven. As Mary Jacobus suggested long ago, eighteenth-century readers would have been familiar with such poems as the Divine and Moral Songs of Isaac Watts, which introduce children, among other things, to ‘Solemn thoughts of God and Death’ (the title of Divine Song X). Watts also taught acceptance of social hierarchy. One of his poems includes the revoltingly smug sentiment ‘Whene’er I take my walks abroad, / How many poor I see! / What shall I render to my God / For all his gifts to me?’ [not ‘why does God allow this?’, or ‘what shall I do about it when I grow up?’]. Another advises children listen to their teachers, if they want to go to heaven, and to reverence ‘their parents’ word / And with delight obey’. But Wordsworth’s poetry about his own childhood deals with ‘a race of real children’ who seem to learn most when they follow their own impulses and are disobedient (they stay out later than they should, they climb higher than they should, they go poaching and steal boats). The poem is certainly based on an encounter the poet had with a child near Goodrich Castle, while walking in the Wye valley in 1793, and presumably the poet had some such conversation. As the poem proceeds, in very leisurely fashion (it may strike you as remarkably long for a poem of such simple material), we learn that this little girl lives in a churchyard with her mother; that her brother and sister both died young and are buried in the churchyard, and that she plays with them; that she has older siblings, two of whom ‘at Conway dwell’ while two ‘are gone to sea’. The narrator insists that if two of the seven are dead, ‘then ye are only five’; she insists very tenaciously, ‘Nay, we are seven’. Is one of them right? How would you summarise each speaker’s view

Lyrical Ballads  37

of death, and of eternal life? You might like to ask yourself, also, what we don’t know: does she have a father? Were John and Jane younger than she is when they died? Has she ever met the two older brothers who have gone to sea, or those who live in Conway (at the other end of Wales)? There seems to be space in the poem to allow the reader to wonder about a number of issues that are not directly addressed. For instance, which of her siblings are most real to her, the two dead ones or the four absent ones? Or what sort of language would she hear from her other, and read on the gravestones she plays among, about death? What is a child to make of the fact that two of her siblings ‘are gone to sea’, little Jane ‘went away’, and John was ‘forced to go’? A comment in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ suggests that the poem is about ‘the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood surrounds our notions of death’, but in the later Fenwick Notes Wordsworth refers to the child as ‘the heroine of the poem’. As often happens with Wordsworth, the two comments appear to point in different directions. Is she at fault in resisting adult truth and remaining in ‘perplexity’? Does she, in fact, strike you as perplexed? Is she the heroine because she refuses to have his view imposed on her? And what do you make of the logic with which she refutes his mathematics: ‘Their graves are green, they may be seen’? It has always seemed to me that this is not just a beautifully triumphant line, but that the poet who later wrote the famous ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, with its view of the grave as ‘a place of thought where we in waiting lie’, must have more in common with this little girl than with the speaker of the poem. (Walt Whitman, the American poet, called grass ‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves’.) It is hard not to feel that the poet of the Lucy poems, written the following winter, is exploring the little girl’s imaginative territory, and very hard not to feel that the adult’s attempt to wrest her joy from her is not merely impertinence but abuse. We know that in 1841, during his last visit to this region Wordsworth made enquiries as to what had become of the girl he had met almost fifty years before. Whatever was actually said between them, that little girl was a lasting influence in his life. Early readers would not have known that the author was partly an animist, believing in the life of all things; and partly a pantheist, believing that all living things share one life, and are divine, though by the end of the volume they might have suspected as much. But they could have learned from the poem which precedes ‘We are seven’  In old age Wordsworth dictated some very informative notes on his poems to a friend called Isabella Fenwick. Extracts are included in most annotated editions, and they are available in book form as The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Bristol Classical Press, 1993).During 2007 this invaluable book will be re-issued in electronic form by Humanities-Ebooks.

Lyrical Ballads  38

that, in Wordsworth’s view, children can often teach adults a thing or two. ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is sub-titled ‘shewing how the art of lying may be taught’. Wordsworth is likely to have known that the phrase ‘the art of lying’ is used in the most famous book on education in the eighteenth century (Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and in several ways Wordsworth’s ideas about children and education are close to (not identical to) Rousseau’s. In this poem Wordsworth illustrates, as he put it later to a correspondent, ‘the injurious effects of putting inconsiderate questions to children, and requiring them to give answers upon matters either uninteresting to them, or upon which they had no decided opinion’. The poem is based on the experience of William and Dorothy Wordsworth who acted as tutors to a friend’s son and observed, as Dorothy recorded, the merits of leaving him to learn from his own desires and at his own pace. Wordsworth seems to make himself the butt of the poem, for demanding of a child answers he himself does not have, to questions of no conceivable interest to childhood—questions of memory, and finely calculated comparisons. Both poems are, in the end, didactic pieces, in which the moral dimension, if not quite a moral, is clearly pointed (‘A simple child ... what should it know of death?’, and ‘How the art of lying may be taught’). As in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, however, the didacticism is directed at adults rather than at children. The speaker in this poem is shown as both bullying and obsessive: ‘five times did I say to him, / Why? Edward, tell me why?’ The moral injury (in effect forcing the child to say something—say anything—to stop this interrogation) is symbolized in physical constraint: the child is meant to be enjoying a holiday, but he is allowed no mental liberty: ‘I said and took him by the arm … / I said and held him by the arm … / While still I held him by the arm’. How far the material of such poems is drawn from Wordsworth’s awareness of his own failings is, of course, impossible to say. We do not know how he behaved towards little Basil Montagu, or the heroine of We are Seven. We do know that the speakers of The Thorn and Old Man Travelling are shown to be capable of error. There is always some distance—i.e. some difference in perspective—between the ‘I’ in these poems, the narrator or speaker, and Wordsworth himself, but it is not always easy to gauge that distance. The Anecdote ends with the speaker seeing his error; We are Seven ends with the persona as unenlightened as he began. He seems not to have asked himself what effect it would have on her if he persuaded her that that her brother and sister ‘are dead’. He remains convinced that he is right and she is simply wrong:  Letters, Later Years, 253.

Lyrical Ballads  39

’Twas throwing words away; for still The little maid would have her will, And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’ Questions: Does ‘We are Seven’ require one to believe that in death we become part of the life of things—pass, as it were, into the life of the grass? Would it be right, or wrong, ultimately, to let the little girl continue in a state of mind where she eats her supper at the graveside and sings to her brother and sister? And how long do you think this little girl (she is eight, remember) will remain able to take comfort in believing that her brother and sister are still with her? Are there signs in the poem that she is already in the process of losing this confidence?

3.2. ‘Politicized Nature Poems’ ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the shore, yet commanding a beautiful prospect’ In some editions, the elaborate title of this poem is given six lines and three levels of typography, yet despite its title, the poem is not in fact about ‘a beautiful prospect’ [or ‘view’], but about prospects unrealized within a desolate self. This fact draws attention to an important facet of Lyrical Ballads. Despite being regarded as a book which inaugurated Romantic nature feeling its contents deal at least as much with the human world as with the natural world. Certainly Lyrical Ballads opens with ‘The Ancient Mariner’, whose hero does eternal penance for the thoughtless slaying of an Albatross, and it closes with an overt piece of nature worship based on a walking tour near ‘Tintern Abbey’, but Wordsworth’s opening poem begins by admonishing the reader somewhat abruptly for indulging in mindless sight-seeing: —Nay, Traveller! rest. This lonely Yew-tree stands Far from all human dwelling: what if here No sparkling rivulet spread the verdant herb; What if these barren boughs the bee not loves; Yet, if the wind breathes soft, the curling waves That break against the shore, shall lull thy mind By one soft impulse saved from vacancy.

If you have read what is said in Part 2 about Wordsworth’s assault on Poetic Diction, it may strike you that the italicised phrases are at least as good (or bad) an illustration of artificial poetic diction as any Wordsworth gives in his essay. The adjective ‘sparkling’ is highly predictable, describing a rivulet. ‘Verdant herb’ is pompous and

Lyrical Ballads  40

tautological verbiage (verdant means green and is there only for its assonance with ‘herb’, an affected euphemism for grass). The alliteration of barren boughs and bee is overdone, and the inversion (‘these barren boughs the bee not loves’) is clumsy. It is almost as if Wordsworth is mocking the reader’s supposed taste for such conventional language. It is possible that these lines of the poem were written at school (Wordsworth says that the poem was ‘composed in part at Hawkshead’) and only kept by the mature poet because they illustrate poetic cliché. The close of the first sentence expresses a characteristic Wordsworthian paradox, that of being ‘lulled’ by an ‘impulse’. Impulse is a complex word that will not be glossed until The Tables Turned, five poems from the end of the volume where it is suggested that if the human mind is in a condition of ‘wise passiveness’, it can receive benign impulses from nature. In this case, it is suggested, if we are not too obsessed with conventionally picturesque views, an ‘impulse’ derived from the sound of lake water, ruffled by a soft breeze, might save us from habitual ‘vacancy’ of mind. We can be lulled out of sleep-walking into wakefulness. The poem offers an account—by no means an easy one—of someone who died at this spot in solitude. We may see him as a vain and loveless hermit, an egotist, who can only see the landscape as a reflection of himself; or as a disillusioned idealist, tortured by his ability to imagine things more beautiful those he sees. It seems that he was for some reason, perhaps through wounded vanity, disengaged from ‘the labours of benevolence’, i.e. socially valuable works inspired by altruism and the love of man. So the poem appears to caution us that love of nature is of little value unless it leads to love of mankind (a major theme in Wordsworth’s later works, The Prelude and The Excursion). It also deals with the fate of those politically disillusioned by events which are not named in the poem, but which contemporary readers would have had in mind—the ‘failure’, as many saw it in those days, of the French Revolution. Wordsworth wrote frequently about idealists disillusioned into despair and even hatred of mankind, by what they saw as the betrayal of the French Revolution, because he himself went through a similar crisis. So although the contemporary reader of Lyrical Ballads could not possibly know this, this man is what Wordsworth knows he might have become, if he had not been saved by the love of Dorothy and of Coleridge. As we shall see, the volume’s closing poem, Tintern Abbey, also leaves clues for the modern reader in search of Wordsworth’s political biography.  In fact one perceptive reviewer at the time did reach the conclusion that ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree’ was a kind of self-portrait.

Lyrical Ballads  41

‘Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed’ This poem is one of a group of lyrics in the collection that express Wordsworth’s own feelings and beliefs, or creed, about nature. Later called simply ‘To my sister’ this poem celebrates the state of idleness (William and Dorothy are taking a day off from their respective labours). Its playful tone seems calculated to scandalize the buttonedup reader: One moment now may give us more Than fifty years of reason; Our minds shall drink at every pore The spirit of the season. Some silent laws our hearts may make, Which they shall long obey ...

A poem celebrating idleness may appear to invite an idle reading: it pretends to offer a relaxed poetry of flat, unproblematic statement. In reality it offers, dead-pan, a succession of paradoxes and of plays upon figurative possibility. ‘It is the first mild day of March’; ‘there is a blessing in the air’; are these two statements of the same kind? And does the air ‘give joy’ to the trees and the grass? In ‘Your morning task resign’; isn’t ‘resign’ rather a large word for ‘set aside for one day’? In the fifth stanza the poet proposes to replace the ‘joyless forms’ of the ordinary calendar with a ‘living calendar’. What might those ‘joyless forms’ be? Social chaos would ensure if everybody decided to date the start of a new year from any morning they felt particularly high. Luckily most of us now agree what year it is, and when a new one starts (the new year used to fall on Christmas day in some countries and at Easter in others). Students of history will know that while in some countries the Gregorian Calendar replaced the less accurate Julian Calendar in 1582, it took 350 years for the rest of the world to fall into line. The French adopted it only in 1760, and then during the Revolution decided to throw out the new calendar and start afresh, dating everything from the Fall of the Bastille—as a sort of universal Spring. The next stanza develops this idea of ‘a universal birth’, precisely the kind of imagery that half  Despite the circumstantial title, it was not Wordsworth’s own house; he did not at that time have a little boy; the person to who they are addressed doesn’t appear until stanza 3 (‘My sister!’) and early readers of this anonymous volume had none of the information modern readers have about the identities of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and their friendship with Wordsworth’s co-author, Coleridge. It is well to remember that poets really do make us of poetic licence.

Lyrical Ballads  42

of Europe had been using just a few years before to describe the French Revolution. In 1805, in his autobiographical poem The Prelude, Wordsworth still remembered ‘human nature seeming born again’. Problem. You may agree that this calendar reference is an inescapable historical allusion, and that no well-informed person of 1798 could have failed to see it this way, but what does the allusion mean? Is Wordsworth still feeling the same kind of ‘bliss’ that he felt in 1789, in the revolutionary ‘dawn’? Or is he associating his present nature feeling with his hopes for the renovation of mankind and nature (‘from heart to heart’ … ‘from earth to man, from man to earth’)? Or is he contrasting a new and more reliable kind of bliss, drawn from nature, to what he now sees as the illusory kind, drawn from political theory?

It is possible that the opening of stanza seven implicitly answers that question. ‘One moment now may give us more / Than fifty years of reason’. The French Revolution was the consequence, and expression, of roughly fifty years of reasoning about the nature of man and society in the Age of Enlightenment. On the other hand, it is equally possible that Wordsworth is simply being provocatively playful, balancing ‘one moment’ of impulse against ‘fifty years’ of reason, like any other young enthusiast for doing his own thing rather than following the rules. Notice, too, the intricately figurative manoeuvre in the second part of that stanza, which takes us from ‘minds’ to ‘drink’ to ‘pore’, to ‘spirits’, to ‘season’. Before reading the next paragraph you might like to ask yourself what train of ideas do these words suggest to you? The words are simple, but the effect of those two lines, I suggest, depends upon an interpretive process something like this: ‘drink’ is first loosely metaphorical, when referred back to ‘mind’. It then becomes more precisely figurative because of the reference forward to ‘pore’ (moisture passes through pores). We then pause to reflect on the oddity of minds having pores—and being therefore like leaves, or any other kind of breathing or sweating organism—before passing on to the ambiguity of drinking ‘spirit’ (a comic reading is obviously possible), and the deeper ambiguity of what kind of ‘spirit’ might be implied. Does the word suggest a generalized sense of the ‘spirit of the time’, or a particular sense of tutelary or guardian ‘spirits’? The poem then poses a further testing problem: that of the casual, unconscious, adoption of binding laws. Notice that it is (romantically) the heart that makes these laws. Perhaps the heart’s laws are not ones the mind, or conscience, would make. They might tug us in some other direction. This direction might be better for us than the mind would choose, or it might not. Does the tone of the poem as a whole suggest that we can and should trust the heart’s laws? This is (despite all this commentary) a very simple poem, easy to read and to enjoy

Lyrical Ballads 43

for its evident pleasure in the moment. Yet its paradoxes relate to the deepest thought of the Romantic period, and to Wordsworth’s most profoundly ‘doctrinal’ poetry. Similar paradoxes can be found in ‘Expostulation & Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’. And by the way, this poem may seem like poetic extravagance—you may think only a poet could possibly imagine that flowers enjoy the air—but it is actually part of Wordsworth’s response to the beliefs of some of the foremost scientific minds of the day. Erasmus Darwin (the poetic grandfather of the more famous naturalist Charles Darwin) and several of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment believed, among other things, (a) that all matter was conscious, (b) that every living thing was capable of feeling, and (c) that every form of matter was capable of motion imperceptible to our senses. The companion poem, ‘Lines written in Early Spring’ develops these ideas more explicitly. Here Wordsworth represents himself as impelled towards pleasant thoughts, by the blended notes of birdsong, but he finds that such ‘pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.’ Something in his experience seems to make him resistant to the optimism he feels. To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran;

(i.e. we all have one soul, and nature herself seeks to link that human soul to the joy we see around us in nature) And much it grieves my heart to think What man has made of man.

It seems self-evident that nature is joyful (and that, for instance, ‘every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes’). The close of the poem shows him puzzled by the endurance of human evil amid nature’s good. ‘I must think, do all I can / That there was pleasure there’, and ‘I these thoughts may not prevent’. They seem inevitable. Yet if nature is indeed joyful and harmonious, if every motion of the birds expresses ‘a thrill of pleasure’, what is it about human beings that makes them refuse paradise? Question: Would it make any difference if ‘And’ in line three were replaced by ‘But’? Does any other stanza in the poem work in the same way? What does this stylistic feature imply?

‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’ These two poems are really one poem in two parts. In later editions these two poems opened the collection. In the first poem, Wordsworth is challenged (as he says in

Lyrical Ballads  44

the Advertisement) by a friend who was in Wordsworth’s view too much attached to books of moral philosophy, and whom some have identified as the critic William Hazlitt. The friend rebukes the poet for wasting his time looking at nature instead of reading books, but in terms which the poet has ironically freighted: ‘Where are your books? that light bequeath’d To beings else forlorn and blind! Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d From dead men to their kind’.

I have never seen this point made about this poem, so you should use it cautiously, but one of the great debates of the French Revolution era was between the conservative Edmund Burke, who opposed the revolution as a break with the past, and the radical Thomas Paine who welcomed it because every generation should make its own choices. The argument between them came down to whether we should be bound by the wisdom bequeathed to us by our forebears, or should see by our own lights and breathe ‘the fresh air of futurity’ as Wordsworth called it elsewhere. In 1793 Wordsworth described Burke’s piety to the dead as ‘a refinement in cruelty superior to that which in the East yokes the living to the dead’ and compared his veneration for ancient acts of parliament—all that ‘dead parchment’—with a call to ‘cherish a corse [corpse] at the bosom when reason might call aloud that it should be entombed’ [Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff]. When there is a difference between the living and the dead, Paine famously said, ‘it is the living and not the dead, who are to be accommodated’. It may be possible to speak of ‘the living and the dead’ in 1798, or address what can or cannot be ‘bequeath’d’, without invoking Burke and Paine, but I doubt it. I also feel sure that the hint of charnel suggested by the opening lines of ‘Expostulation’ (‘the spirit breathed from dead men’) is less than wholesome. When the poet replies in stanzas 5 and 6 he begins with self-evident remarks about the senses and then passes to a slightly more mysterious sense of how we learn from a speaking universe ‘this mighty sum / Of things for ever speaking’. Part of what he says is straightforward Empiricism (the belief that our knowledge is derived from our senses); part of it implies that the living world desires to illuminate mankind (there are ‘powers / Which of themselves our minds impress’ and the best thing we can do is prevent our busy little minds interfering with what the world wants to say. In ‘The Tables Turned’ the poet warms to his theme, dismisses the whole world of books in favour of the linnet and the thrush and offers instead the ‘breath’ of health and ‘the light of things’. You may feel that the comic rhymes (‘linnet’ / ‘in it’) and obvious hyperbole [exaggeration] in finding more wisdom in the song of a linnet than

Lyrical Ballads  45

the Western intellectual tradition, invites one to take the poem lightly. Certainly there is something wry about a book recommending that we close up our books, and the literary pun in ‘impress’ [impress = print on] is playful in the same way. Yet there is earnestness in the last three stanzas—and a resonance in the memorable aphorisms (‘We murder to dissect’) that seems to invite one to consider rather deeply what might be meant by ‘One impulse from a vernal wood’ or by coming forth ‘into the light of things’ bringing ‘a heart that watches and receives.’ As Wordsworth’s poetry became known in the New World, these stanzas were among the ones most often learned by heart, and they are intrinsically ecological, or ‘Green’. Perhaps ‘wise passiveness’ is wise because it involves a discipline of receptivity, a willingness to learn from the world, rather than see it only through human imperatives. A ‘heart that watches and receives’ does suggest a rare attunement to the living universe. What might an ‘impulse from a vernal wood’ feel like? Might it, for instance, make one resolve to love mankind or save the planet? To ‘come forth into the light of things’—to be fully aware of and sensitive to the real environment—sounds like a strenuous prescription. Question. ‘To my sister’ suggests that the laws the heart makes for itself are the only ones it is likely to ‘long obey’. It is a psychological truth that such imperatives need to arise from within, and express our deepest needs. How would you unpack the implications of ‘One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can’? Is it just meant to be provocative; or might it in some sense be true? Perhaps such ‘truths’ need to come from ourselves before they mean anything to us.

3.3. ‘Social Protest Poems’ ‘The Female Vagrant’ This first-person narrative (as it stands, the entire poem except the last four lines is in the dramatized voice of a woman) is part of a long poem called ‘Salisbury Plain’ (in 1793) and ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ (when first published as a whole in 1842). The original poem of 1793–94 was composed soon after Wordsworth’s solitary walk across Salisbury Plain, when he was brooding on war preparations in Portsmouth and the prolonged separation from Annette and his child. Its various versions are thoroughly in tune with the politics of Tom Paine and the anarchist philosophy of William Godwin, the two great radical luminaries of the time. In its longer forms the poem concerns an encounter (somewhere near Stonehenge, which serves as a symbol of human sacrifice) between two people who appear to be sacrificial victims of what we might

Lyrical Ballads  46

want to call state capitalism. He is a former sailor, who has been press-ganged into military service, trained to kill, defrauded of his rightful pay after being discharged, and (in understandable desperation) ‘met a traveller, robbed him, shed his blood’. The Female Vagrant’s story is equally condemnatory of the condition of England. Her sufferings begin when her father falls victim to the greed of a new landowner: Then rose a mansion proud our woods among, And cottage after cottage owned its sway. (lines 39-40)

Refusing to sell his cottage, her father is victimized, and loses his fishing rights and his means of subsistence. Her husband is enlisted to fight in the American War (i.e. against America in what some call the American Revolution, others the War of American Independence). In her way of putting it, ‘the noisy drum / Beat round to sweep the streets of want and pain (93-94). As wives sometimes did in those days, she goes with him, enduring ‘foul neglect’ for months before setting sail, and watching men and women die of fever while still in port. Those who survive neglect and the crossing arrive ‘a poor devoted crew’—i.e. ‘devoted’ to be sacrificed to foolish policy and ‘royal pride’. The American War of 1776–83 was, in Wordsworth’s eyes, the first of two wars against liberty fought by Britain, the second being the war against France, which began in 1793. The depth of his anti-war feelings comes out in this stanza: Oh dreadful price of being! to resign All that is dear in being; better far In Want’s most lonely cave till death to pine Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star. Better before proud Fortune’s sumptuous car Obvious our dying bodies to obtrude, Than dog-like wading at the heels of War Protract a cursed existence with the brood That lap, their very nourishment, their brother’s blood. Question: are these lines altogether persuasive as an expression of her feelings? Considering the sweetness of her nature earlier in the poem, the lines may seem too rhetorical, and too educated, and too politically committed. Her own nature seems to come out more in the simplicity of her first reference to her husband: ‘There was a youth who I had loved so long, / That when I loved him not I cannot say’. But brutal experience does change people.

Arriving back in England she is left to starve: ‘And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, / And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food’. Starvation leads her to hospital, where she experiences, uncomplainingly, the neglectful and callous treatment of the poor; she finds among gypsies her ‘first relief’; tired of vagabonding and

Lyrical Ballads  47

‘midnight theft’, she learns ‘to live upon the mercy of the fields’; and her story ends with two simple lines in which the rhythm seems to convey how tragically defeated she is: —She ceased, and weeping turned away, As if because her tale was at an end She wépt;—becáuse she hád no móre to sáy Of thát / perpét/ual wéight / which ón / her spí/rit láy.

If you have been reading these quotations with your ears you may have noticed that some of the lines, like the last one quoted, are two syllables (one iambic foot) longer than others. The form of stanza in the poem is Spenserian stanza, rhyming ababbcbcc. It is a difficult stanza to write, partly because it repeats the b rhyme four times, and a slow one to read, both because the couplets in the middle and the end seem to create two resting places per stanza, and because the last line is hexameter instead of pentameter (it has six metrical feet instead of five). As you get accustomed to it, the ear listens for that final lengthened line. Another example of hexameter is ‘And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food’ Spenserian stanza is associated with Edmund Spenser’s long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene. This form carries with it suggestions of chivalry, echoes of the golden age of Elizabeth 1, for whom The Faerie Queene was written, and perhaps an implication that the poem will concern the fight of good against evil. It is also a very pictorial form, in that poets using it tend to devote each stanza to creating one scene or picture or event (it is the stanza also of Keats’s sensuous and highly decorated poem ‘The Eve of St Agnes’). Much of the style of this poem is imitation Spenserian. For instance, when Wordsworth writes of gypsy life that ‘For them, in nature’s meads, the milky udder flowed’: the effect is to evoke pastoral idyll, human kindness, and a world of meaning, starkly contrasted with the theme of wartime misery and folly. Not all of the language effects in this poem can be defended. There are too many traces of old-fashioned poetic diction (in the first stanza the vagrant speaks of her ‘fleecy store’, meaning her flock of sheep; other examples are the ‘snowy pride’ of swans, line 27, and the personifications of Murder and Rape in lines 157-8, which Wordsworth later removed). But its inwardness is often very successful. The moment of the heroine’s eviction is shown through her eyes, with the emphasis on her sensations at that moment: I could not pray:—through tears that fell in showers, Glimmer’d our dear loved home, alas! no longer ours.

Lyrical Ballads  48

All in all it seems to me a powerfully sustained story of suffering, which is significant not least because, like ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Forsaken Indian Woman’, her story is told not by a male narrator but by the woman herself. As Gary Harrison says, ‘Wordsworth’s ‘treatment of the poor as a class … capable of philosophical utterance and deep feeling really did break through a dominant wall of prejudice’, and his refusal to ‘police the borders of the once privileged space of the poem’ (in which the poor should be seen and not heard) challenged class as well as genre categories. Not all feminist critics would agree, but some would add that the same point applies to gender boundaries. ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ This comic yet moving poem is based upon William Godwin’s famous proposition that property is theft. Its argument is that in an unjust state of society fundamental human needs are criminalized by what Wordsworth himself called ‘mere rights of property’. The poem has been recognized as openly parodic. Mary Jacobus sees it in relation to Hannah More’s Cheap Repository for Publications on Religious and Moral Subjects, which were sold in large numbers to help do-gooders convey moral truths to the lower orders. Such moralistic poetry chastises such (supposedly) working class vices as intemperance, improvidence and ingratitude in the name of solid bourgeois virtues. For instance, More’s The Market-Woman; a True Tale (of which a detail is shown here) chastises the use of dishonest ‘weights and measures’. Wordsworth’s ‘true story’ is true because it is based on the writings of Dr Erasmus Darwin (a medical scientist, and a member of the so-called ‘Lunar Society’, a gathering of well-known scientists who met each month on the full moon). The poem’s characters are chosen to activate habitual moral associations. Harry Gill is a respect Gary Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 178.

Lyrical Ballads  49

able farmer, well within his rights. By middle class prejudices, Goody Blake (‘Goody’ is a contraction of ‘Goodwife’ = ‘Mrs’) is one of the undeserving poor, because she is conspicuously improvident: .

Oh joy for her! when e’er in winter The winds at night had made a rout, And scatter’d many a lusty splinter, And many a rotten bough about. Yet never had she, well or sick, As every man who knew her says, A pile before-hand, wood or stick, Enough to warm her for three days.

Because of her need, she steals sticks from Harry Gill’s fence. He gets so upset by this that he lies on wait for her one frosty night and catches her in the act; whereon she utters an impressive curse—impressive because she raises her withered hand in the moonlight: ‘O may he never, never more be warm!’ Perhaps because of his guilty conscience, or perhaps because the curse is uttered by moonlight, the curse takes effect. It is striking that this poem is the only one in the collection that condones revenge on a property owner—an onslaught brought about by nature, in the form of frost and moonlight, and by Harry’s own imagination. He suffers ever after from psychosomatic effects, in the form of a mysterious chill. Perhaps because Goody Blake comes close to expressing class anger, it is the only one of the explicitly ‘social’ poems that makes use of considerable quantities of humour. In fact the genre of the poem is very hard to place. It has pantomime qualities (all those coats), elements of the curse poem (Goody Blake with her withered arm upraised in the moonlight), straight economic data on the poverty trap (we are informed that all she can earn is insufficient to pay for candlelight to work by, and coal is out of the question), sociological observation (the economic reasons why two old women might choose to share housekeeping), and gleeful rhymes in a jaunty metre. The poet overtly invites empathy (‘Sad case it was, as you may think, / For very cold to go to bed, / And then for cold not sleep a wink’), and the poem includes one unexpectedly imaginative simile: Harry Gill’s teeth which ‘chatter, chatter’ throughout the poem finally do so ‘like a loose casement in the wind’. It is all so good humoured that one could hardly quarrel with it, or take it ill. Could one? Yet at the close of the poem the property-owning reader is cautioned to ‘think’, in fear and trembling presumably, ‘of Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ and learn their neighbourly duty. For all the comedy, one early critic (Dr Burney) smelt anarchy:

Lyrical Ballads  50

what will become of property, he asked, ‘if all the poor are to help themselves, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbours’? ‘The Last of the Flock’ The most radical aspect of Wordsworth’s social poems is who speaks. In conventional eighteenth century social poetry the poor may by the subject of poems, but the speaker will almost always be middle-class. The representative poem on such themes—the kind of poem to which Wordsworth supposes his readers to be accustomed—is written from the observer’s point of view, and in somewhat abstract poetic diction: the interest may be sensationalist or sentimental, appealing at best to pity, at worst to prurience. In ‘The Last of the Flock’ and ‘The Mad Mother’, which are among the earliest example of dramatic monologue,10 the narrator merely sets the scene. He tells us nothing. Instead, the subjects of the poems take matters into their own hands and give their own perspective. The reader is challenged to submit not to unusual material, but to a wholly unfamiliar perspective—that of the victim. Wordsworth lets the reader glimpse the world through the eyes of the powerless. That is why the experimental diction really matters—the poems are written in ‘a selection of the language really used by men’, and this language is neither silly nor unsuited to the expression of harrowing emotion. The effect can be disturbing in several ways, as seeing the world upside down often is. In ‘The Last of the Flock’ all the narrator tells us is that he met a healthy man, weeping, with a lamb in his arms. In the rest of the poem the shepherd himself describes the psychological impact of a poor relief system which insists that people cannot be helped until they have been impoverished and degraded. And the realism of the poem is most striking in the fact that the father is bitterly aware of how his inability to feed his children affects his feelings towards them and his neighbours, and eats away at his sense of himself. All his life, Wordsworth poured scorn on the conservative position that enabling a man to feed his children somehow weakens the moral fibre; he knew better and remained convinced that society owes its members a decent level of welfare. We may feel with Dr Burney that ‘if the author be a wealthy man’ he should not have suffered the poor peasant to part with his lamb. But ‘The last of the Flock’ is 10 The dramatic monologue is usually associated with the Victorian poets Browning and Tennyson. A skilful dramatic monologue allows the reader to understand more than we are told, and quite probably arrive at an image of the speaker which is very different from the one he or she wishes to project. In ‘The Mad Mother’, for instance, the woman clearly thinks that she is behaving quite rationally, whereas the reader may fear for her child.

Lyrical Ballads  51

less a plea for private charity than a caustic reflection on an ill-conceived system of relief. Where Blake makes his similar message both explicit and (to be honest) rather abstract (‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody poor’), Wordsworth offers a piece of apparently unedited testimony, such as one might find in the records of social research. One cannot overestimate the importance of a poet using his art to make the voting classes listen and learn. Perhaps also, what the man says might have caused William Godwin to reflect on whether, as he claimed in Political Justice, property is always evil. Here, as in ‘Michael’, Wordsworth recognises the connection between property and self-worth. ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’ The striking thing about ‘The Mad Mother’ is that despite being about madness, it offers nothing at all in the way of outrageous stimulation or voyeurism. There is nothing frantic or freakish about his ‘poor maniac’ and Wordsworth protects both her privacy and her independence. The Fenwick note states merely that the ‘poor creature’ was reported to him by ‘a lady of Bristol’. Whoever she is, and wherever she came from, what she has to say helps to explain Wordsworth’s claim in ‘Tintern Abbey’, that ‘the language of the sense’ anchors our moral being: Suck, little babe, oh suck again! It cools my blood; it cools my brain; Thy lips I feel them, baby! they Draw from my heart the pain away.

‘It cools my brain’: in other words, the mother depends on her child to soothe her fever. What her madness consists in we are not told, and it is up to the reader to build up a picture of her condition from what she says in the poem. What do you understand by her reference to ‘fiendish faces’ in the third stanza before she awakens to find that she is with her little boy and ‘only he’? Does she hallucinate? Does she suffer from delusions? Do you think her relationship with her baby is likely to be an appropriate one—i.e. one in which she looks after the infant? What kinds of emotional demand might she make of him? In the penultimate stanza, as the infant stops feeding, what is the likeliest reality of those ‘wicked looks’? Do you believe she knows what is poisonous and what isn’t? To understand this poem you have first to understand the speaker. You have to enter the mind and perceptions of a woman who is either insane or close to it, and empathise with her feelings. It would not be too much to say that you have to identify

Lyrical Ballads  52

with her. And the same challenge—to cross an immense gap in experience between yourself and the characters—becomes even more of a challenge in ‘The Idiot Boy’. Wordsworth is not content to tell you about his characters: he writes in such a way that you have to align your feelings with theirs to understand his poems. And bearing in mind that his readers were well-to-do members of the gentry, who would probably have turned their backs on a mad mother—supposing they ever got close to one— what kind of challenge would that involve? ‘The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman’ was written after reading Samuel Hearne’s Journey from … Hudson’s Bay (1795) and it illustrates both an interest in travel narratives, especially in North America11 and the universality of Wordsworth’s view of human nature. There is a slight sense that native American practices are cruel and alien, but the emphasis of the poem is less on sociology than upon what Wordsworth sees as the likely feelings of a mother seeing her child taken away by the tribe. Read it slowly, for its full meditative effect. One interesting touch is that in her phrase ‘a most strange something did I see’ the mother uses one of Wordsworth’s favourite words for the not altogether comprehensible, as in ‘a sense of something far more deeply interfused’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’. ‘Old Man Travelling’ This little poem exists both with and without the piece of dialogue (direct in one version, reported in another) at the end. The little hedge-row birds, That peck along the road, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step, His gait, is one expression; every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought—He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten, one to whom Long patience has such mild composure given, That patience now doth seem a thing, of which He hath no need. He is by nature led To peace so perfect, that the young behold 11 Wordsworth’s poem ‘Ruth’ was inspired partly by another travel book, William Bartram’s Travels in North and South Carolina (1791).

Lyrical Ballads  53

With envy, what the old man hardly feels. —I asked him whither he was bound, and what The object of his journey; he replied ‘Sir! I am going many miles to take A last leave of my son, a mariner, Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth, And there is dying in an hospital.’

The shorter version, without the last six lines (half-toned here), is a remarkable piece of writing, highly imaginative in Wordsworth’s best manner. It embodies in the mystery of words a state of life which is in some sense less than human, in some sense more than human: it is hard to know whether to classify it as descriptive or visionary. It is a very good example of seeing imaginatively: it has a wonderful unity of tone, and all the details serve to one effect. Wordsworth found the lines in one of his manuscripts (they were part of his draft for a longer poem called ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, which appeared in volume 2) and something made him feel that to make them suitable for Lyrical Ballads he would have to modify them. Why? Some readers find it incongruous that the old man, who has been depicted in a state of animal tranquillity, should suddenly speak. It is made still more incongruous in 1800 when the title Old Man Travelling gives way to the subtitle alone, so that the fact that the man is ‘travelling’ to a distant destination is still more unexpected. The incongruity, however, is with all that is implied by ‘a sketch’—i.e. something sketched by a possibly sketchy observer. The shorter poem, in which the old man is seen but not heard, is certainly beautiful, but the Wordsworth who wrote Lyrical Ballads was concerned crucially with ‘men as they are men within themselves’, rather than men as they apt to appear to picturesque painters. To use a phrase of Wordsworth’s friend Charles Lamb, about a slightly different point in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, we might say that this poem is about the mind ‘knowingly passing a fiction upon herself’. We are all prone to see things the way we would like to see them. Perhaps this poem dramatizes how a sentimental and exploitative imagination might view the old man merely as a picturesque figure in the observer’s own landscape. That pleasing but deception is then is undercut by a humane and radical intelligence aware of the human tragedy his apparently painless existence represents. Of course it would be nice if this old man were ‘insensibly subdued / To settled quiet’, and if he had no need of effort, and if patience were ‘a thing, of which / He hath no need’. But when the old man speaks, everything after the first dash is exposed as wishful thinking, developing the inspired fiction of line

Lyrical Ballads  54

six. The close of the poem involves being jolted out of poetic vision into hard prosaic reality. The shock is amplified in the socio-political gulf expressed in the single word ‘Sir!’—a word speaking across the class gulf to the reader in numerous of these ballads as a reminder of how easy the gentry find it to discount human suffering. It is also conveyed in the abrupt and deliberate rupture of the seductively beautiful style. 3.4 ‘Mock-Ballads, or Anti-Ballads’ All of the Lyrical Ballads ask the reader, as Wordsworth said in his 1807 letter to Lady Beaumont [quoted above], ‘to see, to think and feel’. But Wordsworth’s claims for the powers of poetry went further than this. As he wrote to Wilson in 1802 [quoted above], ‘a great poet ought to rectify men’s feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane’ (sane meaning healthy). In ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Idiot Boy’, and ‘The Thorn’ we see this most clearly. I call these ‘mock ballads’ because in them Wordsworth relies upon the reader’s familiarity with ballad procedure, appears to promise a rattling good yarn, and then delivers something wholly unexpected, in terms of material and method. ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman, with an Incident in which he was Concerned’ It is a leisurely and artfully misleading title, and this strange poem deals in a variety of bafflements. ‘Simon Lee’, like the later ‘Hart-Leap Well’, which also does something unexpected but in a different way, begins in straightforward ballad style: In the sweet shire of Cardigan, Not far from pleasant Ivor Hall, An old man dwells, a little man,

but it drops at once into the incongruity of ‘I’ve heard he once was tall’. The first stanza ends whimsically, ‘He says he is three score and ten, / But others say he’s eighty’. What follows for some two-thirds of the poem is a sustained disruption of ballad decorum and the author-reader compact. In the third stanza Wordsworth promisingly modifies the ‘pleasant hall’ of Romance into the deserted, faintly Gothic, ‘hall of Ivor’; but this potentially chilling inversion is casually dissipated in a comic rhyme: ‘He is the sole survivor’. Authentic ballads, and literary ones, could, of course, cope with uncomfortable facts, as in ‘And though he has but one eye left’, but they were not prone to squander such effects in the subsequent jauntiness of ‘His cheek is like a cherry’. Wordsworth

Lyrical Ballads  55

returns doggedly to this missing eye two stanzas later—‘His hunting feats have him bereft/ Of his right eye, as you may see’—and adds a little more by way of diagnosis: His little body’s half awry, His ancles they are swol’n and thick; His legs are thin and dry.

The same ankles reappear some stanzas later: ‘For still, the more he works, the more / His poor old ancles swell’ and at the psychological moment (when Wordsworth probably feels he has done enough to make the reader impatient with these unpoetical eye-sockets and ankles) he chooses to address the reader: My gentle reader, I perceive How patiently you’ve waited, And I’m afraid that you expect Some tale will be related.

Whatever the patient reader may desire, s/he is cautioned, ‘should you think / Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’. Only then, having abandoned all pretence of story-telling, do we get the anticipated story-tellers opening, ‘One summer’s day…’. The constant shifts of tone induce a sense of insecurity, and bewilderment as to what kind of poem this is intended to be. This is partly the effect of the way the first six stanzas, especially, vacillate between past and present. (Wordsworth kept tinkering with this balance in many revisions). The wavering quality means that until almost half way, the poem just might turn into the kind of antiquarian ballad that its opening half promises to be. But eventually Wordsworth’s naturalistic account of Simon and Ruth displaces the literariness and the antiquarianism teasingly offered in the opening stanzas, and the poem appears to say that we ought to find a real anecdote about an old man’s feebleness and his swollen ankles just as interesting, and appropriate to poetry, as his legendary hunting feats. Does this poem reach a conclusion? Is there a point to it? Inviting the reader to conjure a ‘tale’ out of this ‘incident’ may imply that there is one way to do this, and that our business is simply to piece together the ‘clues’. Or it may not. The poem insists that we think, but we may think in various channels and nothing much will happen until we do. If a poem implies some achieved insight, it really is our choice whether there is or is not to be ‘a poem’. Just what are we supposed to ‘mourn’? We may, to attempt one answer, focus on the indeterminate symbolism of the action performed by the narrator. When the narrator severs the root of the tree, a fountain

Lyrical Ballads  56

of gratitude springs from Simon’s supposedly dried up condition. Simon’s gratitude seems out of proportion to the very slight service the narrator has performed for him, and one might mourn this very fact, especially in the reduced state in which he lives. One might equally mourn the thoughtless way in which the narrator sweeps aside this ‘overtasked’ old man—tactlessly making as light of the man as of the task. What the close of the poem says is: ‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind, / Kind deeds with coldness still returning. / Alas! the gratitude of men / Has oftner left me mourning’. We have already been asked to take what is left of the poem ‘kindly’. But what does kindliness mean? If you feel ‘kindly’ does that mean you feel charitable towards people who are differently situated? Or does it mean that you recognise your kinship with other people, and feel yourself to be of the same kind? The poet’s ‘I hope you’ll kindly take it’ is addressed to ‘my gentle reader’, a phrase with a class implication. The reader belongs to the gentry; the poet may; Simon Lee does not. These repetitions push us gently towards a spirit of ‘kindliness’ with, and not merely towards, this liveried retainer. Swollen ankles or not, we should consider such men—Wordsworth said in his letter to Fox (p. 31 above)—‘with reference to the points in which they resemble us’ and not merely ‘those in which they manifestly differ from us’. On this egalitarian point, the closing line of the poem may contain a faint echo of Robert Burns’s ‘Man’s inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn’. It would be hard to summarize the theme of Simon Lee more adequately than in Burns’s famous line ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’. ‘The Idiot Boy’ Like ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ uses facets of ballad form for unusual purposes, and in this case the poet includes some direct burlesque of ballad poetry. Here the stirring ballad rhythms are used to present an ambling plot, in which the narrator participates incongruously—manipulating the strings, chiding his characters and his muse, confiding in his audience, and tantalizing them too. Who is this narrator? Like other lyrical ballads this one leaves one in doubt, for a while, whether we are hearing the poet himself. The narrator in ‘The Thorn’ is carefully characterised: is the narrator of this poem also characterised? He seems to be another villager, a rustic, and rather an amateur at the business of story-telling. How much does he know? It seems to me that the ‘point of view’ in the poem is only a little ahead of the characters: the neighbour-narrator sees the pony coming before Betty does, and he knows her mind like his own, but tells us nothing that she does not see. Moreover his manner of addressing characters and readers alike is embarrassingly familiar—his language and manners

Lyrical Ballads  57

are more like Betty’s and Susan’s than the likely reader’s, and he turns to and fro as if negotiating between stage characters and his audience. His mockery (if it is mockery) is generously bestowed upon Betty, a foolish mother who sends her idiot boy to a churlish doctor to help a sick (or hypochondriac) neighbour: There’s scarce a soul that’s out of bed; Good Betty! put him down again; His lips with joy they burr at you, But, Betty! what has he to do With stirrup, saddle, or with rein?

The chiding is applied here, for instance to motherly ‘fiddle-faddle’, foolishly misplaced pride, and thoughtless generosity. It is applied later to our pre-established codes of how a narrative poem should proceed. Betty’s pride and silliness, and the gentle reader’s desires, are chastised alike. What has happened to Johnny? The question leads into a display of parodic power, unleashed in a style that seems suited to border balladry: Perhaps, with head and heels on fire, And like the very soul of evil, He’s galloping away, away, And so he’ll gallop on for aye, The bane of all that dread the devil.

Some early readers clearly doubted whether a comic poem on the theme of mental deficiency could be in good taste, and many modern readers share some unease. But the embarrassment the poem can generate arises from a calculated decision to close the distance between reader and character, using that bumbling but artful narrator as intermediary—as if he is holding the reader with one hand and Johnny with the other insisting that we meet. There is also a strange equivalence between the reader’s irrational feelings of discomfort and those of the mother. The mother’s fond pride is comically chastised, and her flights of morbid fancy while she waits for her boy’s return are also treated comically—her thoughts of suicide not excepted. But when she finds her son, the narrator prods her forward to embrace him: And Betty sees the pony too: Why stand you thus good Betty Foy? It is no goblin, ’tis no ghost, ’Tis he whom you so long have lost,

Lyrical Ballads  58

He whom you love, your idiot boy. She looks again—her arms are up— She screams—she cannot move for joy; She darts as with a torrent’s force, She almost has o’erturned the horse, And fast she holds her idiot boy.

Like ‘The Mad Mother’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ requires participation in the feelings it presents. A subject is chosen by the poet in the full knowledge that his reader will expect certain kinds of gratification: instead, another and more salutary experience is presented. A poet, Wordsworth told John Wilson, should not only represent feelings to his readers which they already sympathise with, but feelings ‘which there is reason to believe they would be better and more moral beings if they did sympathise with’. Until one does sympathise, this poem may be read ‘with more than common dislike’, but to give to the reading public ‘new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane’—as he said in the same letter—cannot be the work of an hour. Only the reader willing to share in the joy of an idiot boy and his feckless mother will be capable of appreciating this poem: it is a carefully selected needle’s eye. It is partly a class point. As he explained to Wilson, ‘if an Idiot is born in a poor man’s house, it must be taken care of and cannot boarded out, as it would be by gentlefolks.’ He went on: I have indeed often looked upon the conduct of fathers and mothers of the lower classes of society towards Idiots as the great triumph of the human heart. It is there that we see the strength, disinterestedness, and grandeur of love…

These strong terms may explain what he meant by seeing ‘the primary laws of our nature’ and ‘the essential passions of the heart’ set forth most clearly in ‘low and rustic life’. It is a long poem, however, and I must leave the reading to you, with just a few leading questions: • Lines 1–26. What impression is made by the narrator’s interruption of his narrative, which he has barely started, to address Betty? Notice the language: ‘bustle’, ‘fret’, ‘fiddle-faddle’; and style of address ‘Good Betty! ... Oh! Betty’. • Lines 77–81, 221–251, and 302–22. What is the tone in the passages on Betty’s worries?? • Lines 322–346. These lines can be seen as deliberately imitating the style of supernatural or border ballads. Do the following lines play with the reader’s probable desire that such a style should be continued?

• Line 348. Why is the narrator still an apprentice after fourteen years? • Lines 357–406. Does this long passage of narrative make Betty a figure of sympathy or of fun? What is the point of the simile in line 384 (‘as with a torrent’s force’)? • The poet makes no comment on Johnny’s story (i.e. the account he gives of his night’s adventures in lines 461–2). What would yours be? It may be worth mentioning that in his letter to Wilson Wordsworth commented: ‘I have often applied to Idiots, in my own mind, that sublime expression of scripture that, ‘their life is hidden with God’.

‘The Thorn’ This poem is worth the very closest reading, as one of the most intriguing narrative poems ever written. But it is very easy to be impatient with it, and to mistake its real significance. And it is very important that you do not take my word for it, but try to work through it for yourself. Having given the poem a preliminary reading you should read, carefully, Wordsworth’s ‘Note on “The Thorn”’. All Wordsworth said in the ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads was that ‘The poem of the Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not supposed to be spoken in the author’s own person: the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently show itself in the course of the story”. Some very qualified readers, from Coleridge to some distinguished modern critics, have failed to remember this fact when penning their interpretations. In 1800 Wordsworth added an extensive note to the second edition (it is included in all modern editions and should be read in full) which opens by admitting that ‘this poem ought to have been preceded by an introductory poem, which I have been prevented from writing by never having felt myself in the mood when it was probable that I should write it well’. This prefatory poem would have introduced the narrator. Preposterously, Wordsworth goes on to say that the reader will have a general notion of the character ‘if he has ever known a man, a Captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity or small independent income to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he not been accustomed to live’. He fully deserves the ridicule this remark has caused (if this is a general notion, what would a specific one be like?) but it does contain some important clues, and what follows is highly significant: Such men having little to do become credulous and talkative from indolence; and from the same cause … they are prone to superstition. On which account it appeared to me proper to select a character like this to exhibit some of the general laws by

Lyrical Ballads  60

which superstition acts upon the mind. Superstitious men are almost always men of slow faculties and deep feelings; their minds are not loose but adhesive; they have a reasonable share of imagination, by which word I mean the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements. It was my wish in this poem to shew the manner in which such men cleave to the same ideas….

With this account in mind, and having asked yourself what an ‘adhesive’ mind might mean, read the first five stanzas very carefully and answer the following questions. • In the first five stanzas of the poem, how many repetitions are there? • What kinds of attributes are heaped upon the natural scene? • Do these five stanzas, devoted to describing a thorn, a pond, a heap of moss, tell you more about the scene or about the narrator? • By the end of the fifth stanza, what sort of connection do you see between these features in the landscape?

Now read the next five stanzas and answer these questions: • In stanzas 6 and 9 why should ‘you wish to see this aged thorn’? • In stanza 8 and 10 whose is the voice in quotation marks? (The same voice returns once more in stanza 20: with what effect?) • In stanzas 9 and 10: what purpose is served by the repetitions (the spot / The spot to which she goes; / The heap that’s like an infant’s grave, / The pond—and thorn, so old and grey’ and ‘But to the thorn, and to the pond / Which is a little step beyond’)?

The ‘story’, such as it is, begins in stanza 11. You can probably read more rapidly from here on but do watch out for the following points: • In stanza 14 what do you make of the casual ‘Last Christmas when we talked of this’. It seems that Martha’s story is a regular topic of conversation in the village. What Farmer Simpson may be implying—though he sounds sympathetic enough—is that Martha was of sound mind when she gave birth, and could therefore be hanged for the murder of her child. • Stanza 15: what fact does this stanza assert? In Stanzas 16–20 by what devices does the poet make the assertion of line 219–20 (‘but all and each agree, /The little babe was buried there’) hard to resist? Why does the poet do this? • In stanzas 21–22 what sense do your get of the human community in Martha’s village? • What conclusion does the narrator expect you to draw from the two facts that he makes ‘plain’ in the final stanza, Stanza 23?

The Thorn begins with three images, laboriously described by a narrator who (according to the poet’s note) is to be imagined as a retired sea-captain of loquacious disposition and adhesive imagination: a thorn tree, a pond, and a heap of moss. One cannot

Lyrical Ballads  61

walk very far on any elevated tract of English moorland without encountering three such items ‘not three yards from the path’, but to this very ordinary sight fifty-five lines of exact description are devoted. It seems likely that Wordsworth chose these particular images because he could rely upon his reader associating them with a particular theme, that of infanticide. He allows his narrator to dwell on them with a lugubrious suggestiveness throughout the opening stanzas. The thorn is described—quite gratuitously—as ‘Not higher than a two year’s child’; as looking as though it had never been young; as being hung with mosses which are not merely ‘melancholy’ but also capable of harbouring a ‘plain and manifest intent / To drag it to the ground’. Near the thorn is a muddy pond, measured by our meticulous guide, who finds it to be (one is slyly given to understand) long enough to accommodate a body of such dimensions as might equally have been hanged on such a thorn, and buried beneath the nearby heap of moss. This heap, So fresh in all its beauteous dyes, Is like an infant’s grave in size, As like as like can be ...

Something like an infant’s grave ‘in size’ is presumably equally like—in that respect— anything else three feet long. Only that repeated ‘like’ lends a suggestion of substance to mere dimensions. In the notes he dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843 Wordsworth said that he had another reason for writing ‘The Thorn’ (i.e. other than illustrating ‘the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind’). He said that having seen an insignificant hawthorn tree in impressive atmospheric conditions he asked himself what he could do, by way of invention, to make it permanently as impressive as it was at that moment. In this respect, the ‘captain’ is the poet’s representative. He is as like the poet as he is unlike, with only a slightly more ‘adhesive’ imagination—reluctant to let go of his pond, and heap, and tree, until they are thoroughly coated with conjecture. Some critics take the Captain at his own estimate, as, in some sense, a reliable witness, or a faithful observer. Yet his role in the poem, if we attend to what he says, is rather to blur the distinctions between fact and surmise. His motive is not to bear witness to a story, but to persuade his listener (the listener within the poem who interjects at stanzas VIII, X, and XX his urgent questions as to wherefore, what and why) to understand his data as though it told a story. ‘Now would you see this aged thorn, / This pond and beauteous hill of moss ...’ (VI); ‘But if you’d gladly view the spot / The spot to which she goes; / The heap ... the pond ... the thorn ...’ (IX); ‘But to

Lyrical Ballads  62

the thorn, and to the pond / Which is a little step beyond, / I wish that you would go’ (X). Wordsworth’s elderly navigator, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, has strange power of speech, and a strange narrative purpose. The dramatized listener (who makes interjections in stanzas 8, 10 and 20) has to be persuaded, as our representative, that these images are significant, and that what they signify is terrible, and—by extension— that the woman herself is terrible (‘I never heard of such as dare / Approach the spot when she is there’). Coleridge and Byron both took The Thorn to be about a deserted mother who murdered her child, and thought it tediously told. Indeed the history of the poem’s interpretation says something both about Wordsworthian understatement and about how we make such judgements. The narrative technique seems designed to make it easy for us to miss the ironic counterpoint between what is said in stanza XV (about whether a child was born or no) and the horrors of stanza XX and what ‘all and each agree’. The demurral of stanza XV was itself followed by a characteristic ‘But’, introducing an irrelevant yet somehow sinister piece of information (the kind of information which becomes ‘evidence’ as the imagination completes the circle of sublime horrors it is busy inscribing on this scene): But some remember well, That Martha Ray about this time Would up the mountain often climb.

All-in-all, the poem works in such a way that the fact of the woman’s misery becomes sufficient proof of her guilt. Certainly the poem shows, as Wordsworth said, ‘the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind’. But it is also a poem about story-telling. It is about the manner in which a community (the villagers and the reading community) can be induced to connect a series of dots into a recognisable outline and then believe in the outline they have made. The consequence in this case is that a number of kindly folk conceive a collective fear of a forsaken woman and ostracize her for twenty years. The same ‘general laws’ can mislead an entire nation into persecution, pogroms, genocide—or as the poet himself had recently done—condoning state terror. Questions: • The key sentence of Wordsworth’s note tells us that the poem illustrates ‘the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind’. But what is meant by an imagination ‘not loose but adhesive’ and how is this seen in the poem? • Wordsworth claimed in another note that he also wrote the poem as an experiment to see if he

Lyrical Ballads 63 could make a simple thorn (a hawthorn tree) as permanently ‘impressive’ as it was one stormy day with the wind blowing through it. Does this mean that superstition and imagination are closely connected? • Martha is allowed to say only two lines (repeatedly). Could you read this refrain aloud so as to make it sound absolutely harrowing? • One critic (Stephen Parrish, in a major reading of the poem in The Art of Lyrical Ballads) suggests that Martha Ray may be entirely a figment of the narrator’s imagination. Do you agree? Is it a better poem, a worse poem, or just a different poem if we make this assumption? • John Danby in The Simple Wordsworth, says that this poem invites one to be aware not only of what one is judging (i.e. what are the facts about Martha Ray) but of what one is judging with. On your first reading of the poem what did you consider Martha to be guilty of? And why did you reach this conclusion? If you read stanza 15 carefully, what does the poem say she is guilty of?

3.5. ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798’ The first remarkable fact about this poem is that Wordsworth composed it while on a walking tour in the Wye valley, and wrote nothing down until he reached Bristol. The second is that, by coincidence, he reached Bristol on 14 July, on the ninth anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille and the eighth anniversary of his own arrival in France, in the festival era of the French Revolution. In recent years12 there has been much debate about whether the poem is somehow guilty of ‘erasing’ history, in favour of a retreat into imagination and nature. Most of that debate has ignored the highly significant fact that to present oneself as pedestrian tourist and ‘a worshipper of Nature’ in 1798 was in itself a political statement. And the close of ‘Tintern Abbey’, as it usually called, presents the speaker of the poem as one who so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love, oh! With far deeper zeal Of holier love.

There is no reason why the feelings of the speaker in this poem—a lyric persona— should correspond to Wordsworth’s own, at any date, let alone on any particular date— for instance 13 July 1798. In fact, in a lyric poem, the feelings of the speaker ought to 12 A seminal essay by Kenneth Johnston, ‘The Politics of Tintern Abbey’ (The Wordsworth Circle, 14:1 (1983), 6–14) sparked the debate by exploring the political significance of all the poem’s ‘anniversaries’, including the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday.

Lyrical Ballads  64

be such as might be experienced by any adult person in similar circumstances—lying under a dark sycamore looking at a beautiful view on a lovely day in July, or thinking of a beloved sister, or remembering his frantic youth, or whatever. That is how lyric poetry normally works. We read in order to understand our own experience, not to explore the detailed biography of a poet. As it happens, however, we know that in July 1793—five years before the poem was written—Wordsworth was still engaged in justification of revolutionary and regicide, and was deeply alienated from his own country and its leaders. We also know that this poem is the concluding poem in a volume that has so far been overwhelmingly about (a) the sufferings of ordinary people, and (b) the poet’s belief that an unjust state of society is profoundly unnatural. It would be reasonable to suppose, would it not, that as the volume’s major statement about Nature, this poem will do something to explain the connection between these two themes. First Movement: Lines 1~23a Crowded with barely perceptible metaphors, the opening paragraph builds a bridge between landscape and the mind, using the landscape itself as the perfect image of a tranquil mind. Amid these cliffs ‘which on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion’ [note it is the cliffs that impress the thoughts] he finds also: These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor with their green and simple hue disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence from among the trees … (my italics)

The orchard tufts which can ‘lose themselves’, the hedgerows indistinguishable from ‘lines of sportive wood run wild’, his farms ‘green to the very door’, blur the distinction (or heal the division) between nature and culture, wild and civilized. What appears to be description is, rather, self-diagnosis: the man contemplating these images desires to follow where nature leads, and be restored to himself. As he looks at the landscape and at ‘wreathes of smoke / Sent up in silence from among the trees’ he seems uncertain whether the smoke comes from ‘vagrant dwellers in the houseless

Lyrical Ballads  65

woods’ or from ‘some hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The hermit sits alone’. In fact, of course, the poems that precede this one show Wordsworth to be all-too-aware that the English countryside is inhabited by victims of war and scarcity. There is ample evidence that at this date the ruined abbey itself was a place of refuge for beggars and vagrants (he had been here as a kind of vagrant himself five years before), and one his own friends, John Thelwall, was living in political exile a little further up the Wye after imprisonment in the tower of London. The only uncertainty in his image is whether the wreathes of smoke come from involuntary exiles (vagrants) or from a voluntary exile (a hermit). Second Movement: Line 23b ~58 In any case, it soon appears that the poet, too, has been an exile—in this case from nature (Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 repeatedly represented city life as a kind of prison or estrangement from real life). But the images he is now revisiting have been a source not merely of memories but of ‘sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’. Here he risks two generalizations about the importance of the images of natural beauty that we carry in our hearts. First, they can affect the way we behave towards each other (i.e. make us more likely to behave with natural kindness). Second, they can enable us to transcend ‘this unintelligible world’ and ‘see into [or commune with] the life of things’. Whether this is so or not, he balances the healthful effect of these ‘forms of beauty’ against the ‘shapes of joyless daylight’ in the feverish world. Note: ‘World’ is used twice in this section (line 41 and 54) and both times with the sense of the social and political world. By the way, it is worth noting that the ‘forms of beauty’ have nothing whatever to do with a ruined abbey. If there were any mention of Tintern Abbey in this poem— which is out of sight several miles further downstream—it might serve as a reminder of a ruined convent on the banks of the Loire, where Wordsworth and his friend Michel Beaupuy had long conversations about Liberty and Nature in 1792 (they talked about classical republican principles, the people’s right to frame their laws, and ‘earth’s wish’, when freed of royal turpitude and other vices, ‘to recompense the patient child of toil’). The two sentiments are connected, and always have been, in republican discourse. Why Wordsworth situated his meditation so close to an ecclesiastical ruin, while pointedly ignoring it, even as a ruin, might be explained by invoking a passage from a famous book of the age, Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature: ‘Let us then reconduct bewildered mortals to the altars of nature; … Let us say to them, that there is nothing, either above or beyond nature’.

Lyrical Ballads  66

Third Movement: Lines 59~112a This lengthy paragraph gets to the heart of Wordsworth’s thinking about ‘Nature’. First he describes himself (quite inaccurately, as far as biography goes) as having been a pure nature enthusiast when he visited this spot five years before—a connoisseur of rocks and cataracts and woods, with no thought for mankind. He had already, he says (lines 74–5) grown out of his boyhood phase, when his pleasures were a mere matter of physical exuberance but had not yet learned to hear what Lyrical Ballads has mostly been about, namely ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ (92). Nor had he discovered what he and Coleridge have since come to call ‘the one life’, a divine energy that circulates through man and nature alike (and which is partly evoked in such poems as ‘To my Sister’ and ‘Lines written in early Spring’). The attempt to describe that indescribable energy involves an astonishing sentence. In lines 95–103 he described what he has ‘felt’ as (a) a presence, (b) a sublime sense (of something whose dwelling is everywhere and everything, from the light of setting suns to the mind of man), (c) a motion, and (d) a spirit that impels all thinking things and rolls through all things. What he takes pains not to say is ‘God’. What he has felt might be what the poet Shelley calls ‘a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe’,13 but it is not reducible to what Christians worship. When Wordsworth’s poetry deals with interactions of the human mind and nature’s living forms (and all of nature’s forms are for Wordsworth living) he tends to use terms like ‘motions’, ‘impress’, ‘presence’, ‘impulse’. Two of these are used in this sentence and two are implied in close synonyms, ‘interfuse’ and ‘impels’. In transactions with nature, nature’s living forms enter ‘far into the mind’ or ‘people’ the mind; lakes lie upon the mind ‘even with a weight of pleasure’; the mind responds, like lakes, to the sky’s influence; and so forth. He seems to have a literal faith in ‘the life of things’. And he believes that ‘intercourse’ between the mind and nature is beneficial. It appears from his poetry, especially his autobiographical poem The Prelude, that what we remember of natural forms (especially sublime and beautiful forms, and places that we love) becomes part of ourselves, part of the structure of our psyche; their traces in us help us to endure. He says in an essay that it is impossible for a mind to be in a healthy state that is not frequently moved by feelings of the beautiful or the sublime (awe-inspiring, uplifting). The passage concludes that because he perceives that ‘presence’ or ‘something’ 13 In the notes to his poem Queen Mab the young Percy Bysshe Shelley said although an Atheist (he was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet on atheism) he did not deny the existence of ‘a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe’.

Lyrical Ballads  67

or ‘motion’ or ‘spirit’ Wordsworth is still a lover of all that we behold in nature (all that is perceived, or half perceived and half-created by our eyes and ears).14 Moreover he regards ‘nature and the language of the sense’15 as (a) the anchor of my purest thoughts, (b) the nurse, guide and guardian of my heart, and (c) ‘the soul / Of all my moral being’. I break it up this way just to draw attention to the fact that this complex sentence makes a slightly different claim at each stage, and that these claims escalate. Nature and ‘the language of the sense’ anchor his mind, and guard his heart, but in some sense they are his soul. In ‘Lines written in Early Spring’ nature linked ‘to her fair works … The human soul that through me ran’. Now Nature herself is even more important. It, or She, is ‘the soul of all my moral being’. Fourth Movement: Lines 112b~160 Dorothy enters the poem in line 115, as the focus of the poem’s final movement. This can be read as an afterthought, or as a climax deliberately reserved. This is not her first appearance in Lyrical Ballads. In To My Sister, she has to be exhorted by her brother to leave behind her book, for once, and consent to a day of sensations rather than of thoughts, enjoying what is here called ‘the language of the sense’. But Tintern Abbey advances her partnership in the volume. Dorothy is promised that her mind will become ‘a mansion for all lovely forms’. As such ‘forms’ are impressed by nature in moments of unusual feeling (the process is shown in ‘There was a Boy’), storing or peopling the mind with all of nature’s forms necessarily takes some years. As a reader of the feminist writers Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth knows that the mind is not gendered. Neither her gender, nor the fact that she has not lived in France or studied at Cambridge, will prevent this ‘dear, dear Friend’ from experiencing the process of growth that applies equally to all equally endowed human minds. It is possible that lines 126–135, with their assurance that a sneering world will ne’er ‘prevail against us’, presuppose a joint career in writing (William and Dorothy did in fact plan to live by translation, which was one reason for travelling to Germany the following winter). 14 The poet Edward Young, whose line is referred to in Wordsworth’s own note, wrote of the senses that they ‘half-create the wondrous world they see’ (Night Thoughts, Book VI, line 424). Wordsworth modifies the point, referring to ‘what they [the senses] half create, / And what perceive’ (almost invariably misquoted as ‘…half create and half perceive’) 15 It is hard to know what Wordsworth meant by ‘the language of the sense’ and the few critics who have commented on it differ widely. I think he meant whatever medium or ‘language’ communicates the objects of our perceptions [things out there] to the mind. The mind does not perceive things directly; it perceives ideas or representations of things.

Lyrical Ballads  68

Dorothy is recognized here as not merely the equal of her brother, but as being quite as necessary to him as Nature. Having devoted four movements of the poem to explaining his faith in Nature, the poet recklessly asserts that even without this faith, his creative confidence would still be unimpaired. Yea, he implies, alluding to Psalm 123, though he walked through the valley of the shadow of death he would fear no evil, ‘for thou art with me’, thou being ‘my dear, dear friend’ and ‘dear, dear sister’. Questions. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is really the first instalment of a mode of poetry that Wordsworth made his own. It is a reflective, first-person, blank verse meditation on the relationship of the mind and nature. Among the things you need to make up your mind about are: (1) Is this poem so introspective that it shows a poet turning his back on the theme of human suffering?; (2) Just what claims is he making for nature?; (3) Do you find that in worshipping Nature he is specifically not worshipping God, or is he reimagining God? (William Hale White, a Victorian reader, said of this poem that in it Wordsworth ‘did what every great religious reformer does; he recreated my supreme divinity’); (4) Do you find the inclusion of Dorothy, and the terms in which she is presented, (a) consistent with what has gone before, and (b) positive or negative? (Some readers find it patronising, because she is not mentioned until the last paragraph, and because when she is mentioned, with her ‘wild eyes’, there is a hint that she is still at the stage of development he was in five years before); (5) Are you sure you understand its argument?

3.6 Some Additional Poems of 1800 ‘Hart-leap Well’ In 1800 Lyrical Ballads was extended to two volumes, and volume 2 opens with ‘Hart-Leap Well’, one of the first poems that Wordsworth wrote after arriving in Grasmere after wintering in Germany. Part 1 of the poem presents an apparently timeless hunting narrative, in an unidentified voice. It renders the joy of the hunter and the passion of the chase—as he did not do in ‘Simon Lee’. He seems to be writing a poem in the mode of the ballad of Chevy Chase, one of the most popular traditional ballads in Percy’s Reliques. In Chevy Chase, The stout Earl of Northumberland A vow to God did make, His pleasure in the Scottish woods Three summer’s days to take. The chiefest harts in Chevy Chase To kill and bear away.

In Wordsworth’s poem, Sir Walter derives a ‘silent joy’ from driving three horses to exhaustion, his favourite hounds to death, and a hart to a suicidal leap. All of this

Lyrical Ballads  69

seems to be celebrated. Part 2 of the poem explains how the poet came by the story he has just told. It introduces a shepherd from whom the poet claims to have heard the tale we have just heard, and discloses what the shepherd thinks of Sir Walter, and the hart, and the accursed spot where the hart fell. We do not know exactly how the shepherd told the tale itself, but we do know that he deplores Sir Walter’s deeds. So who tells the first tale? We have to call it the poet’s narrative, because the verses in which the poet claims to have ‘rehearsed’ the tale belong, clearly, to the writer, in 1800, and because it disguises the shepherd’s strong sympathies with the hart. So in Part 1, the poet seems to have been wearing a mask, writing as an anonymous minstrel. When that mask is removed at the start of Part 2 it is tempting to re-read Part 1 to see how effectively the anti-hunting tone has been disguised. In 1799, in a draft of the poem ‘Nutting’, Wordsworth wrote ‘I would not strike a flower as many as man would strike his horse’, so it is unsurprising that the poet, when he addresses the shepherd in Part 2, finds ‘small difference … between thy creed and mine’. The poet agrees with the shepherd that it is not manly ‘to blend our pleasure or our pride / With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels’. Both agree that this is ‘a doleful place’. If we now re-read Part 1 we may find that the poet-narrator has quietly marked Sir Walter’s ruthlessness. Sir Walter represents a rampant masculinity defined by aggression, lack of concern, and sexual conquest (it is quietly implied that the ‘pleasure house’ he built at this place of death witnessed many seductions). Part 1 has shown his disdain for dogs and men, and his boastful pride—‘Till the foundations of the mountains fail / My mansion with its arbour shall endure’—justifies the shepherd’s distaste for Sir Walter and his works. Although the poet finds ‘small difference’ between his own creed and the shepherd’s, he does not explain what that small difference is. There are, however, two essential differences between poet and shepherd. One difference is that the shepherd is a little bit like the narrator of ‘The Thorn’. When he says of the fountain that ‘often-times, when all are fast asleep, / This water doth send forth a dolorous groan’ he exhibits ‘the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind’. He also relies on hearsay evidence (‘Some say that here a murder has been done’). Secondly, the poet knows that we need reminders of our own brutish nature. For the poet, therefore, nature will allow the remains to be overgrown only when mankind no longer needs to be reminded of its ascent towards humanity: ‘She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known; But at the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown.’

Lyrical Ballads  70

‘There was a boy’ ‘If I had met these lines running wild about the deserts of Arabia’, Coleridge said, ‘I would have instantly screamed out “Wordsworth”’. Certainly there is no better expression in Wordsworth’s poetry of the harmony of the earth and the stars; the intimacy between childhood and nature (think of Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, or the film version, Kes); the way landscape inhabits the mind; how boyhood games can lead to deepened awareness of the world. Despite the third-person ‘he’, and the fact that Wordsworth’s describes himself standing mute at the child’s grave, the lines are clearly autobiographical, in that they deal at a very subjective level with how scenes of nature can take possession of the mind, when the mind is at a pitch of attention. Eventually, the lines form part of Book 5 of The Prelude, where their function is to demonstrate how much more can be learned by children running wild in nature than when cooped up in a schoolroom. The action described is very common in boyhood, and, at the same time, can be seen as symbolizing how in childhood we interact in a much more open way with the rest of nature, and even how, in the childhood of the race, human beings may have understood the language of animals and birds and been able to converse with them (such a power is often ascribed to witches and wizards, such as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings). One can find such writing so natural and apparently artless that it defies commentary. But notice how the surrounding trees and ‘the uncertain heaven’ are received into the ‘bosom of the lake’. Because of the two meanings of the word ‘reflection’, water is often used in poetry as a symbol for memory or consciousness. In this case the visual scene is providing a counterpart to the action of the boy’s mind and heart, as all the visible and audible scene is carried ‘far into his heart’. The simple word ‘far’ implies that the receptive heart and mind of the boy are somehow able to include the entire visible scene—the lake, the mountains, and the stars. It is one of the most memorable illustrations of the way the Romantic poets conceived of the limitless expanse of the human mind, which is equivalent to the universe of things, and capable of accommodating rocks and stones and trees and mountains and stars, as if they were of the same substance as the mind. One might almost say the mind is absorbing or digesting its world, except that it is very clear in Wordsworth’s philosophy that our mental health depends upon such entities remaining themselves. Lakes soothe the mind—Windermere ‘lay upon my mind even with a weight of pleasure’; streams and rivers energize it; mountains elevate it. What nature does in such scenes is impregnate the mind, with the seeds of future pleasure.

Lyrical Ballads  71

‘Nutting’ For Freudian critics, this poem (as it stands) is a gift, dealing with adolescent male hormones discovering their sexual identity, in an act of ravage, or symbolic rape. You may want to wonder why there is something feminine about a grove of erect hazels hung with clusters of nuts. And in any case, it is made clear in the longer version of the poem that what puts Wordsworth in mind of his past nutting expeditions is his sister Dorothy presently ravaging a hazel grove. He warns his sister that his own pillage made him guiltily aware of a spirit in the place and that ‘unless I now / Confound my present spirit with the past, / … I felt a sense of pain’. One is entitled to wonder (Wordsworth himself seems unsure) whether his later responsiveness to nature’s ‘spirit’ could really have been energized as early as this—could the sympathetic spirit possibly coexist with the ‘glad animal movements’ of a boy’s existence (the phrase is from ‘Tintern Abbey’)? If so, is it innate? The Prelude suggests that in the development of the human spirit certain kinds of sympathetic feeling, though innate, have their own season—that perhaps the predatory moments of boyhood are a necessary repetition of the savage childhood of the race, before we reach what ‘Hart-leap Well’ calls ‘the milder day’. Either way, it is interesting that such savagery seems just as natural for the sister as for her brother. In the concluding lines (which in the short version are as surprising as the address to Dorothy in the fifth movement of Tintern Abbey) the brother invites his sibling to share the moral he has learned: ‘Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades / In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand / Touch—for there is a spirit in the woods.’ Even sisters sometimes need reminding that everything that lives is holy, or that there is ‘one life’ within us and all things. The Lucy Poems After publishing Lyrical Ballads the Wordsworths and Coleridge travelled to Germany, where they separated so as to maximise their chance of learning German. Coleridge studied in the University of Göttingen, developing many of his scientific interests. William and Dorothy spent the coldest winter of the century cooped up, with very little company except each other (partly because they were evidently not a married couple and were viewed with some suspicion by the locals). The result was one of the most marvellous of Wordsworth’s bursts of productivity. He drafted The Twopart Prelude (roughly the first two books of the fourteen-book Prelude) together with ‘There was a boy’, four Lucy poems, and the Matthew poems.

Lyrical Ballads  72

‘Strange fits of passion’ is the jauntiest of the Lucy lyrics. Here the speaker is presented as wholly wrapped up in the lovers’ dream—‘In one of those sweet dreams I slept / Kind nature’s gentlest boon / And all the while my eyes I kept / On the descending moon.’ He appears to be hypnotized by the moon, and his trance-like condition is amplified by an extraordinarily successful stanza about the motion of his horse: My horse moved on; hoof after hoof He raised and never stopped: When down behind the cottage roof, At once the bright moon dropped.

The rhyme-word dropped is expected from the moment the word raised is used, but when it occurs it is applied to a celestial body which can rise but not drop (it can ‘set’, which it quite another matter). The effect is rather like being snapped back into everyday consciousness by a stage hypnotist. So rapid is the drop, and so completely has the lover identified the moon with his beloved, that he finds its/her disappearance almost heart-stopping. It is like a premonition of death ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’ is a remarkable poem in that it relies almost wholly on two metaphors and some slightly teasing paradoxes. Critics have enjoyed pondering whether there can be such a thing as an ‘untrodden way’ (The New England poet Robert Frost seems to have enjoyed that idea; he recycled it in his own poem ‘The Road not Taken’ which first claims that of two roads he took ‘the one less traveled by’, then remarks that ‘as for that, the other was just as grassy and wanted wear’). There is a similar pleasure to be had in teasing out the significance of why there were few to know her but none to love, and balancing the idea that she lived unknown with the final claim that few could know when Lucy ceased to be. Solving such apparent riddles involves dwelling on the meaning of ‘unknown’ and ‘love’. Do you form any impression of how old she is, or what her relationship was with the speaker of the poem? She is depicted in the central stanza as both ‘A violet by a mossy stone, / Half hidden from the eye’ and ‘Fair as a star when only one / Is shining in the sky’. The two similes may imply that she is at the same time insignificant yet important, vulnerable yet hidden, tender and celestial, simple yet to be wondered at. John Beer comments on the similes especially well: ‘at the one pole the flower, focus of human affection, and tenderness for the particular, at the other the single star, focus of the human imagination and of wondering perception. Lucy possesses the qualities of

Lyrical Ballads  73

both poles.’16 Listen, too, for the beautiful, choking rhythm: She líved unknówn and féw could know When Lúcy céased to bé; But shé is in her gráve ^ and Ó The dífferènce ^ to mé

The symbol ^ signals a silent ictus, or significant pause, equivalent to a stressed syllable. The ictus in line three is necessary to make up for the fact that in cannot bear the expected stress without sounding silly or leaden, so an additional weight falls on grave, slowing the line. Line four, as a trimeter, requires three stresses, but dífferènce cannot be said with the two equal stresses (the third syllable has at most a secondary stress), so in effect, all the weight of the three stresses is divided between diff and me, with a compensating pause between. The Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne said of this poem that it renders ‘the sense of absolute and actual truth, of a sorrow set to music of its own making, a sorrow hardly yet wakened out of wonder into a sense of its own reality’.17 A slumber did my spirit seal has probably been subjected to more critical appreciation than any eight lines in English poetry (if you cannot learn them by heart you may be doing the wrong subject!). To some readers it is unrelievedly bleak. In the first stanza she seems ‘a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years’ but in the second stanza she is without ‘motion’ or ‘force’, rolled round with other things in the material Newtonian universe. There is no sense that one might sit beside her grave and sing to her, as in ‘We are seven’. Here, dead means dead. But some readers find consolation in the close. Coleridge’s letter to Poole called it ‘a sublime epitaph’, implying that he found it uplifting, or perhaps that it sublimates loss into peace. In other Wordsworth poems (in The Prelude especially) rocks and stones speak; and Lucy, in the next poem discussed, has felt ‘the breathing balm of mute insensate things’. If even it is hard to feel that ‘rocks and stones’ participate in what Wordsworth and Coleridge called ‘the one life within us and abroad’, one can hear ‘and trees’ as an up-beat caveat. In this poem, by the way, even less is said about the girl or woman than in the others, and she is not named; consequently one critic has ingeniously argued that it is really about the death of the speaker’s spirit, perhaps his spirit of childhood, or his creativity 16 John Beer, Wordsworth and the Human Heart (London: Macmillan, 1978), 95. 17 Algernon Swinburne, Miscellanies, cited from Muriel Spark, ed., Tribute to Wordsworth (London and NY: Wingate, 1950) 114.

Lyrical Ballads  74

The above three poems appeared in that order, and together, in the 1805 edition. Three years she grew, which appeared later in the volume (after two Matthew poems and ‘Nutting’), returns to ballad style. Here Lucy is seen as a flower which a masculine nature spirit has sown to reap for his own pleasure. ‘Lucy’ has undergone another age shift, dying long before she can become a love object to the poet. Although there is, again, a sense both of tragic loss and of inevitability, this poem dwells upon growth. Interestingly, Lucy’s upbringing in this poem is peculiarly Wordsworth-like. Her moulding by Nature is just like Wordsworth’s own, as narrated in Two-Part Prelude and she has the kind of powers that he claims as his own. She seems to share in the being of clouds, and fawns, the willow, and stars and rivulets, and she can draw from the silent things of nature, the calm that is theirs. In ‘There was a boy’ Wordsworth described the ‘death’ of a boy who in childhood ‘blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, that they might answer him’ and some readers take that boy as a past stage of Wordsworth’s own existence. We all ‘die’ out of childhood into adulthood. One could see Lucy’s story as a dramatic variant on this theme. The speaker is left with ‘The memory of what hath been / And never more will be’. Essentially, the Lucy Poems (like the Matthew Poems that accompany them, and which concern a wise man’s adjustment to the loss of his daughter) are about death and how we deal with it. The experience of the death of others, and the anticipation of one’s own death, is a rite of passage for every human being. Coming to terms with death—as the very condition of life— is a necessity, and for a poet whose subject is ‘the primary laws of our nature’ it is an inescapable theme. Wordsworth devoted a very great part of his work to loss, grief and endurance of mortality, and the Lucy poems, it seems to me, are not merely among his most beautiful work, but among his most characteristic. ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ One of the commitments Wordsworth made on his return to Grasmere in December 1799 was to deal in his poetry with the life of the community he now belonged to. He began to write pastorals—not in the conventional sense, of idealized pictures of amorous shepherds and shepherdesses, or courtiers sampling the simpler life of the woods, but in the sense of poetry exploring the actual relationship between rural workers and the land. See Chapter 2 (critical extracts from Wordsworth’s Letters) for Wordsworth’s commendation of these two poems to Charles James Fox, the Whig leader who, Wordsworth felt, had grasped, like himself, that ‘the most sacred of all property is the property of the poor’. ‘The Brothers’ is a graveside dialogue between

Lyrical Ballads  75

a homely priest and a shepherd-lad turned sailor, who has gone to sea as the only recourse when his family’s land is undermined by market forces. The priest never recognizes Leonard as the long-lost brother of the lad whose death he feelingly narrates. Just five lines of this poem, lines (212b–213a, and 296–9) deal with the destruction of the thousand year patrimony of the Ewbanks. In ‘Michael’ some twenty lines explain how Michael’s land came to be mortgaged. But Wordsworth clearly felt that describing the ‘sacred’ property of the poor as ‘buffeted with bond / Interest and mortgages’ (‘The Brothers’) is a sufficient reading instruction for the historically aware. The poem does not dwell on what happened to the Ewbanks, so much as on who they are. The sailor behaves with the utmost delicacy of tact and feeling, as if to challenge Francis Jeffrey’s celebrated remark (in his sightly later review of Lyrical Ballads) that the feelings of a working man cannot possibly be the same as those of a gentleman. As Wordsworth said to Fox, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ were written ‘with a view to shew that men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’. ‘The Brothers’ also exhibits Wordsworth’s great theme, the creativity of human perception. If one wants to know what Wordsworth meant in ‘Tintern Abbey’ by saying the mind and senses ‘half create’ what they perceive, one need look no further than Leonard’s maritime world, as he hangs over the ship’s side: And, while the broad green wave and sparkling foam Dash’d round him images and hues, that wrought In union with the employment of his heart, He, thus by feverish passion overcome, Even with the organs of his bodily eye, Below him in the bosom of the deep, Saw mountains, saw the forms of sheep that graz’d On verdant hills … (The Brothers, 53–62)

In other words, Leonard sees feelingly; just as Coleridge reads the dying coals of his fire with an imaginative eye in ‘Frost at Midnight’, this sailor, whose feelings have always been involved with nature’s forms and colours, sees in the ‘bosom of the deep’ the loved memories of his native land and early occupation. Imagination is not a poet’s gift, but an essential human power. The opening of ‘Michael’ reads: If from the public way you turn your steps Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll, You will suppose that with an upright path

Lyrical Ballads  76

Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent The pastoral mountains front you, face to face. But courage! for beside that boisterous Brook The mountains have all open’d out themselves, And made a hidden valley of their own.

We are invited both into the mountains and into a vanishing culture. The ‘pastoral’ mountains not only make hidden valleys of their own, like human sheepfolds, but shaped a vanishing way of life, a social equality once as native to them as the (now equally legendary) ‘kites that overhead are sailing in the sky’. Who is speaking [one of the first questions to be asked of almost any poem]? Wordsworth is just 30. Yet the speaker in this poem seems much older, a representative of a rooted and dignified culture, with an oral tradition. The narrative voice is as much a creation as the one used in ‘The Thorn’. The narrator of ‘Michael’ refers, as if to a point already made, to this as ‘the first, / The earliest of those Tales’ that interested him in shepherds. He is looking back to his boyhood when he learned from the patriarchs of his childhood the tale—already traditionary—of one who lives only in the memory of the elders of the tribe. These eyewitnesses can be, and are, consulted, for it is the poet’s business to preserve the tribal memory. Some of the perceptions in the poem, such as the ancient lamp that gives the cottage its name, ‘The Evening Star’, or that Michael and his wife were ‘a proverb in the vale / For endless industry’ are communal ones. The opening of the narrative proper makes it clear that Michael is both physically and spiritually, despite and because of his station, an exceptional being: His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen, Intense and frugal, apt for all affairs, And in his Shepherd’s calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men.

Not only does he understand the language of ‘all winds’, but he had been alone Amid the heart of many thousand mists That came to him and left him on the heights.

A cloud-wrapped mountain top is where the Patriarch Moses went to commune with God. There is a strong implication that Michael, having been alone amid the heart of many thousand mists, has also come face to face with ultimate mysteries. In other

Lyrical Ballads  77

words, if there is a folk quality to this story, it is one reminiscent of the Old Testament, and in particular the story of how Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, to prove his faith in God. In that case, God commanded Abraham to do so, and the point of the Bible story is that Abraham does not know that God will in the event provide a ram to be sacrificed instead. He has to prepare himself for the humanly repellent act of slaying his own son. The fact that Michael is prepared to send his son away, despite strong forebodings that he may not see him again, establishes a connection with Abraham. Before Luke departs his father involves him in a ‘covenant’ (another Old Testament term) laying the first stone of a new sheepfold so that both will have a symbol to carry in their hearts of their partnership. As he does so, Michael seems to foresee the worst: ‘whatever fate / Befall thee, I shall love thee to the last, / And bear thy memory with me to the grave’. For the modern reader, Michael may appear to sacrifice his only son to save his land, just as Abraham prepares to sacrifice Isaac to keep in with God. It is true that the land is Luke’s, as much as Michael’s. But without a sense of the almost sacramental nature of the bond between a shepherd and his land, the idea of putting land before blood can seem very deficient in feeling. How would you decide this point? Is Michael culpable, in your view? In Wordsworth’s view, it seems, the villain of the piece is what we might call Capitalism or ‘market forces’. In ‘Michael’, as in ‘The Brothers’, it is the eating away of immemorial tenure by pieces of parchment—bonds, securities, mortgages, and in this case forfeiture—that forces Michael to act as he does, if he is to have anything to leave to Luke. The point of Michael’s life to date has been to free the land from debt so that Luke will have something to inherit, will have a life. If anything, Michael has sacrificed himself to the land, so that Luke may enjoy it. Now he has to place his trust in Luke’s capacity for enterprise. And as you will see, from the five and a half lines Wordsworth devotes to the matter, that trust is terribly misplaced In the quotation below, the narrator turns aside from Michael’s tragedy to muse first on what applies to all of us and then on the community’s perception of Michael’s last years: There is a comfort in the strength of love; ’Twill make a thing endurable that else Would break the heart:—old Michael found it so. I have conversed with more than one who well Remember the old man and what he was Years after he had heard this heavy news.

Lyrical Ballads  78

His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength…

The repetition of the italicised lines comes with an enormous unspoken ‘but’. But what can such strength avail? In an 1820 revision Wordsworth modified the third line quoted to read ‘that else / Would overset the brain,—or break the heart’. It is as if Michael’s endurance of Luke’s breach of their covenant can symbolize any great human loss or defeat; for instance—in the poet’s case—the disillusionment an entire generation felt after another breach of promise, the failure of the French Revolution. The last line of Michael, ‘Beside the boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll’, returns us to where we began, in line 2, confronting the then ‘tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll’. Now, however, we know that beside it there also stands an unfinished covenant, symbolizing perhaps the unpredictability of human endeavour when set beside nature’s inevitability and the flux of time. When Wordsworth drew Fox’s attention to this poem, he seems to have hoped that Fox could do something to revitalise the dying way of life of which Michael and Leonard are representative. This did not happen. But as the nineteenth century progressed, this poem did commend itself more and more to readers who understood the democratic implications of Wordsworth fundamental message, in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, that ‘we have all of us one human heart’. Coleridge wrote to William Godwin, the political philosopher, with special reference to ‘The Brothers’, ‘Ruth’ and ‘Michael’ that ‘I should judge of a man’s Heart & Intellect precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read those poems’ (25 March 1801).

Part 4: Critical Reception 4.1 Contemporary Opinion Much early criticism of Wordsworth is very hostile, a fact which explains Wordsworth’s genuine reluctance, for much of his career, to publish his major work. The most hostile review of Lyrical Ballads appeared belatedly in 1801, as part of a review of another ‘Lake Poet’ Robert Southey. Attacking what he called the Lake School (meaning Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) Jeffrey said this about Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’: One of their own authors indeed has very ingeniously set forth (in a kind of manifesto that preceded one their most flagrant acts of hostility) that it was their capital object ‘to adapt to uses of poetry the ordinary language conversation among the middling and lower orders of the people’. What advantages are to be gained by the success of this project we confess ourselves unable to conjecture. The language of the higher and more cultivated orders may fairly be presumed to be better than that of their inferiors: at ant rate it has all those associations in its favour by means of which a style can ever appear beautiful or exalted, and is adapted to the purposes of poetry by having been long consecrated to its use. The language of the vulgar, on the other hand, has all the opposite associations to contend with; and must seem unfit for poetry (if there were no other reason) merely because it has scarcely ever been employed in it.

Vulgar language, according to Jeffrey, must involve vulgar feelings. His review shows just how deeply Wordsworth’s democratic view of life could offend a middle-class reader, even a reader who saw himself as politically progressive: Now the different classes of society have each of them a distinct character as well as a separate idiom; and the names of the various passions to which they are subject respectively have a signification that varies essentially according to the condition of the persons to whom they are applied. The love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character is not only expressed in a different language but is in itself a different emotion from the love of, or grief, or anger of a clown, a tradesman or a market-wench.

Lyrical Ballads  80

Even Robert Southey, though acquainted with the authors, and although he praised ‘Tintern Abbey’ and spoke of the author’s genius making him ‘rank with the best of living poets’, found something carping to say about almost every poem he mentioned in his review. There were, of course, some more enthusiastic readers, who found and enjoyed both ‘simplicity and tenderness’ or praised ‘a lack of affectation’, in the volume, but many were puzzled, and missed the artificiality they had come to expect from poetry. Some reviewers grasped that the authors were clearly admirers of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, but thought it a strange and retrograde step to imitate ‘the rude numbers of barbarous times’ rather than the ‘sweet and polished measures’ of such 17th and 18th century poets as Dryden, Pope and Gray.18 Others, such as John Stoddart, welcomed the refreshment of poetic style, and praised the fact that ‘The author has thought for himself; he has deeply studied human nature, in the book of human action; and he has adopted his language from the same sources as his feelings’.19 The volume was certainly not panned, many reviewers finding ‘a singular degree of merit’ or ‘no ordinary degree of merit’ in the collection and praised individual poems for their ‘singular felicity’, professing themselves ‘much captivated by’ the collection, and feeling that the author (few grasped that it was the production of two men) ranked with ‘the best of living poets’. Charles James Fox, the Whig leader showed admirable taste when replying to Wordsworth’s letter: ‘The poems have given me great pleasure and if I were obliged to choose out of them, I do not know whether I should not say that Harry Gill, We are seven, the Mad Mother, and the Idiot, are my favourites’.   The problem for Wordsworth (shown here in his forties in a portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon) is that the Edinburgh Review exercised more influence than all the other periodicals put together. After the third edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802 Wordsworth kept his head down until 1807, publishing very little except a series of sonnets published mainly in newspapers in 1802.   His next collection of poetry, Poems in Two Volumes (1807) led to attacks on Wordsworth’s ‘namby-pamby’, ‘puerile’ and ‘effeminate’ qualities. His major didactic work, The Excursion, published in 1814 attracted National Portrait Gallery, London some respectful and enthusiastic reviews, but these were 18 Dr Charles Burney, Monthly Review, June 1799. 19 The British Critic, February 1801.

Lyrical Ballads  81

drowned out by another savage review by Francis Jeffrey. Partly in consequence of his experience of hostile or uncomprehending criticism, some of the longer work written before or at the same time as Lyrical Ballads (such as ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, ‘Peter Bell’, and ‘Benjamin the Waggoner’) remained unpublished for decades. And The Prelude—a revolutionary epic of the growth of an individual mind—though completed in 1805, was not published until after Wordsworth’s death in 1850. Coleridge In some ways his reception was advanced, in other ways hindered, by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, shown here in a portrait of 1795 by Vandyke. Coleridge devoted much of his literary autobiography (Biographia Literaria, 1817) to what purported to be an exposition and defence of Wordsworth’s poetic value. Because Wordsworth and Coleridge shared a lengthy and productive friendship it is often imagined that Coleridge’s criticism in Biographia must be friendly and insightful. In part, it was; buit it also itemised in a very damaging way what Coleridge saw as the errors in his friend’s literary theory and practice. He summarises the theory in an inaccurate and unfair fashion, in order to pour scorn on it. The treatment may have a special authority, but it is written by a man who is wholly unsympathetic to, where he is not actuNational Portrait Gallery ally blind to, what Wordsworth’s dramatic poems in Lyrical Ballads are attempting. Critics who have dealt most ably with this blindness include Don Bialostosky and Stephen Parrish, referred to below. On the one hand, Coleridge clearly did regard his friend as the most original poet since Milton, and he praised him for such attributes as austere and pure language, the weight and sanity of thoughts and sentiments, observations ‘which are fresh and have the dew upon them’, meditative pathos, and what he calls ‘imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word’. This sounds impressive, except that it isn’t easy to tell, at this point, which sense of the word ‘imagination’ he has in mind. He also praises Wordsworth for the originality of single lines and paragraphs (a very dubious compliment indeed, implying that the whole is rarely satisfactory), and makes the very odd comment that Wordsworth writes about suffering as a spectator

ab extra, an ‘onlooker from without’, which seems to imply a lack of empathy. Then he listed Wordsworth’s faults in a manner that could only provide ammunition for unfriendly critics. He complains of unevenness of style, sudden sinkings from poetry into what would have been better in prose, an undue predilection for the ‘matter-offact’, prolixity, repetition, and bombastic writing, in which the language is greater than its subject deserves. One perceptive observer wrote in 1817 that ‘I much doubt whether Wordsworth would allow that man to understand his poems who talks of them as Coleridge does’.20 The fact is that Coleridge disparaged much in Wordsworth’s poetry that he, Coleridge, found unacceptably radical in its approach. As a poet, in 1798 to 1800, Coleridge was a great pioneer, producing a number of unique and inimitable poems. As a critic he was both expert and highly conservative, and his sympathy with Wordsworth’s use of common language, and his interest in ordinary people, was very limited at the best of times. Set beside the personal comments and public reviews of more sympathetic readers, such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, Coleridge’s formal criticism is lacking in empathy. It praises only those facets of Wordsworth’s poetry that Coleridge can still identify with, especially the meditative poems in blank verse, and the more elevated lyrics. William Hazlitt William Hazlitt differed from Wordsworth politically and fell out with him perosnally. He could be very waspish indeed about Wordsworth, but his comments in The Spirit of the Age (1825) are written with characteristic brio, and strike a friendly note: To the author of Lyrical Ballads, nature is a kind of home; and he may be said to take a personal interest in the universe. There is no image so insignificant that it has not in some mood or other found the way into his heart; no sound that does not awaken the memory of other years. The daisy looks up to him with a sparkling eye as an old acquaintance… an old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections…. He has described all these objects in a way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him, and has given a new view or aspect of nature. He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them. The learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them: but the 20 William Whewell, Wordsworth The Critical Heritage, ed Robert Woof (Routledge, 2001) 984.

Lyrical Ballads  83

author has created himself an interest in the heart of the lonely and retired student of nature, which can never die. …There is little mention of mountainous scenery in Mr Wordsworth’s poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth.

Other Contemporary Views Both Byron and Shelley (especially the latter, whose great lyrics ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ are full of echoes of Wordsworth) came under Wordsworth’s influence as a nature poet and through his political sonnets, but found themselves repelled by his growing political conservatism. The most interesting case is that of John Keats whose letters show him convinced that Wordsworth is not only a genius, but a ‘deeper’ poet than John Milton, having seen more deeply into the human heart, and explored ‘the burden of the Mystery’ (May, 1818). But Keats could also find Wordsworth unacceptably didactic poet. He coined the term ‘the egotistical sublime’ for Wordsworth, and wrote in one of his more disgruntled letters (February, 1818): For the sake of a few fine or imaginative or domestic passages are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims f an egotist?…Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul and does not startle or or amaze it with itself, but with its subject…. I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular

Is Wordsworth an especially didactic poet? Or especially egotistical? I have written about ‘We are Seven’ and ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ as didactic poems, in which it is clear that the speaker in both of these poems is wrong. It may seem, therefore, that the problem for the reader is simply to work this out—i.e. that one is not free to make up one’s own mind. Many people (the poet John Keats included) have found Wordsworth too didactic, and many have found him decidedly more didactic than, say, Blake. But Keats’s view was based on the long and very didactic poem The Excursion. It is my impression that almost all poets use what might be called ‘reading instructions’ and that Blake’s Songs are in fact designed to impel the reader towards certain conclusions, just as certainly as are Wordsworth’s, even if the clues are sometimes very subtle. Nobody feels that Blake means one to be happy with the conclusion to his poem ‘The Chimney Sweep’ (in which an exploited little chimney sweep comes out with the moral that ‘if all do their duty they need not fear harm’) or wants one to admire, uncritically, the procession of orphans in ‘Holy Thursday’. He expects us to dissent,

Lyrical Ballads  84

and to make sure that we do, he writes a contrary poem in Songs of Experience, to point the way to a reconsideration. To some extent all poems are constructed in such a way that the co-operative reader will follow a series of clues and hints, choose wisely between two alternative possibilities (one of which is ultimately more satisfying than the other), and so come to share the poet’s true vision, as opposed, say, to the limited vision of the speaker in the poem—whose opinions may be ironically ‘placed’. But one can feel that certain readings are simply wrong without being at all confident as to what reading would be right, or just where the implications lead. ‘We are seven’, I suggest, does require one to side mainly with the little girl, and to see the speaker’s failings; but as with other poems—like ‘Simon Lee’—there is more to it than that. I would put it this way: you could write a very lengthy essay on ‘We are seven’ without exhausting its possibilities, simply by following through its hints—but the conclusions one reached would be your own. They would have been brought about by your own interaction with Wordsworth’s poem, but they would not have been imposed by him onto you. 4.2 Victorian Re-Assessments The Victorians, notably the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, the art critic Water Pater, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novelist George Eliot, valued Wordsworth very highly indeed. Much the best account of this is now available in Stephen Gill’s admirable book Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford University Press, 1988). George Eliot cannot really be listed as a critic, since she barely wrote about Wordsworth, but the poet was in her genes. When she sent her short novel Silas Marner to the publisher she wrote that she did not suppose that any one would understand it, ‘since Wordsworth is dead’. Her own fascination with childhood, with origins, and with ties to place, with loyalty, with self-consistency, and with the roots of the affections, is all deeply Wordsworthian, and quiet allusions to Wordsworth’s leading ideas can be detected in all of her novels, from Mill on the Floss to Middlemarch. Matthew Arnold promoted a lyrical Wordsworth, and seemed unaware of his political significance, and unimpressed by the philosophy which later critics valued. ‘Wordsworth’s poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable’, Arnold said, ‘as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote the poem for him. He has no style’ (‘Wordsworth’, 1879). In his ‘Memorial Verses’, after the death of Wordsworth, Arnold said that Wordsworth ‘laid us as we lay at birth / On the cool flowery lap of earth. / Smiles broke from us and we

Lyrical Ballads  85

had ease’. He had not Byron’s ‘force’, or Goethe’s wisdom, Arnold implies, but what the world will miss is Wordsworth’s ‘healing power’. Walter Pater, a delicious stylist, whose criticism is often as lyrical as this passage, praised Wordsworth for the way that … this sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.

Wordsworth, in other words, was in Pater’s eyes gifted with kind of vision that the ancient Greeks possessed when they saw every object animated with spirit. He also had, in Pater’s eyes, the ability to fuse word and idea, matter and form: His words are themselves thought and feeling; not eloquent or musical words merely, but that sort of creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts, directly to the consciousness.

John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher attributed to Wordsworth’s ‘culture of the feelings’ his own recovery from a nervous breakdown caused by his own intellectual upbringing. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist, stole more of his own ideas from Wordsworth (especially ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Expostulation and Reply’) than he ever acknowledged. He called the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ ‘the high water-mark of intellect in this age’, praised the short parts of The Prelude that he knew as ‘self-reliant’ and wholly original, and said that by his courage Wordsworth ‘added new empires to the muse’. 4.3 Strands in Twentieth-Century Criticism By the start of the twentieth century Wordsworth’s reputation stood higher than any other British poet since Shakespeare and Milton. For an early academic critic like A C Bradley, Wordsworth was in fact one of the triumvirate of great British poets. Two chapters of his Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Macmillan 1909) and his lecture on English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth (Manchester 1909) pointed later critics both to features of Wordsworth’s style—including his way of meaning quite literally that others would mean only metaphorically (as in ‘tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes’)—and to the possibility that his poetry addressed questions that lay at the heart of philosophy.

Lyrical Ballads  86

Philosophical Contexts From the 1920s to the 1950s critics took up the challenge of taking Wordsworth’s thought very seriously and numerous studies focused on how his work related to British Empirical Philosophy, to psychology from David Harley through to Freud, and to German Idealism and Nature Philosophy, in such figures as Kant, Hegel and Schelling. Throughout this period, criticism of Wordsworth was dominated by studies of The Prelude, the autobiographical poem which came to control how people perceived both Wordsworth’s life and his shorter poems. Coleridge often said that Wordsworth had the powers to produce the first truly philosophical poem, but he seemed to think he had not done so. By the 1960s, however, The Prelude came to be recognized not as an attempt to put Coleridge’s ‘system pf philosophy’ into verse, but as intrinsically exploring the deepest questions of philosophy, the interactions of the mind with its world, by chewing the cud of experience. Just what Wordsworth had to say about the human mind and how it works was addressed by two fine studies that came out in the 1960s, attending very closely to what Wordsworth writes, rather than exploring parallels with other thinkers. Colin Clarke’s Romantic Paradox (1962) explored with great lucidity the double meaning that a word like ‘image’ had for Wordsworth—as both a thing and a representation of a thing—and the fact that in Wordsworth’s poetry, Nature can heal or teach or chasten because rocks and stones and lakes and trees are of the same stuff as the mind. Geoffrey Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (1964) advanced the idea that Wordsworth is not primarily a poet of Nature. On the contrary, he claimed, The Prelude is the story of how imagination is fostered and humanized and liberated from Nature. Poetic Innovations and Communicative Strategies One of the least pretentious and most influential studies of the shorter poems in the mid-century was John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 1797– 1807 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). Danby’s study succeeded in attracting serious critical attention to some of Wordsworth’s apparently easier work. Among other things, Danby’s book attended to the subtler implications of Wordsworth’s language, drew attention to his understated irony, and relished the work required of the reader. In my opinion, at least, the major critical work of the 1970s, in the next three works mentioned, was primed by this very engaging study. In Paul Sheats’s The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1785–1798 (Harvard University Press, 1973) Lyrical Ballads is treated as the end result of a process of

Lyrical Ballads  87

maturation and experiment. The last three chapters offer subtle investigations of the development of the ballads and ‘Tintern Abbey’. Stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1973 is always interesting, and bravely defends Wordsworth from some of Coleridge’s hostile and frequently inept criticism of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria. The fact that Lyrical Ballads is often thought of as the founding text of Romanticism, and as doing something wholly different from anything written earlier in the eighteenth century, can be very misleading. Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 gives a very clear account of exactly what Wordsworth owed to his precursors and contemporaries, and where he is original both in insight and in technique. Of the Reader Response, or hermeneutic, school of criticism, the outstanding figure in Wordsworth studies is Don H. Bialostosky. His book Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1984 is a consistently impressive demonstration of what it means for a reader of Wordsworth to do what the poet expected, namely ‘to grapple with him’. It contains very persuasive readings of most of the Lyrical Ballads, including some of the least obviously challenging poems which have been ignored by other critics. Contextual and Historical Criticism Wordsworth has attracted the attention of numerous writers concerned with his politics. Emile Legouis did the pioneer work in his book The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770-1798 (Dent, 1897) and in William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (Dent, 1922). Legouis rediscovered an aspect of his work that the Victorians has entirely forgotten, namely that he became a great poet in part through being politicized by the French Revolution, and that much of his mature work is social in its focus. Both David Erdman, the great Blake scholar, and the historian E. P. Thompson contributed to the recovery of what could be termed the Marxist Wordsworth. But the undoubted expert on this aspect of his work is Nicholas Roe, whose book Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (Oxford University Press, 1988) is much the best modern introduction to the politics of the young Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the complexity of their relations with numerous other political figures and milieux. In these notes we have already looked at the significance of references to rewriting the calendar (in ‘To my Sister’), man’s cruelty to man, in ‘Early Spring’, the words ‘kind’, ‘kindliness’ and ‘livery’ (in Simon Lee), the burden of the ‘dead leaves’ (Expostulation and reply’) and perhaps most interestingly the meaning of the word

Lyrical Ballads  88

‘worshipper of nature’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’. In each case, I have suggested, simple phrases which one might well pass over or take in an everyday sense do seem to have particular vibrations when they come from a poet who spent a formative year of his life in revolutionary France, and returned to England a committed ‘patriot’, in the sense of a man of the people. In a mild way we have been using ‘New Historicism’. As a movement, however, New Historicism specialized in demonstrating that the supposedly radical Romantic poets—especially Wordsworth—were really prisoners of their upbringing and agents of reaction. It is a sad fact that some of the most celebrated essays in new historicism, as applied to Wordsworth, pursue their arguments by selective and distorting quotation, so as to develop readings that are well below the threshold of reading competence. One honourable exception is Kenneth Johnston, whose essay ‘The Politics of Tintern Abbey’ (The Wordsworth Circle, 14:1 (1983), 6–14) opened up real insights into the political background of that poem by focusing on the various anniversaries signalled by the date in its title—including the assassination of Marat. Another new historicist whose work is of real critical value, is David Simpson. In Simpson’s books the Wordsworthian imagination is always social and historical, there is ‘an explicit social discourse’ in Wordsworth’s poetry, confronting ‘the dangerous effects of a commercial and industrial economy’, which results in an unsuspected density of historical reference and allusion within his texts. Simpson’s Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York & London: Methuen, 1987) is full of genuine insight, based on close reading and a thorough grasp of historical context. Why so fine a critic admires some of the sillier and less responsible manifestations of new historicism is a mystery to me. A work that seems not to belong to any particular tendency, but is remarkable for the depth and breadth of its historical scholarship, is Alan Bewell’s Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). This offers a brilliant examination of Wordsworth in terms of what used to be called the background of ideas, including enlightenment anthropology and science, showing, for instance, how a poem like ‘Peter Bell’—a conversion narrative, contemporary with but too long to be included in Lyrical Ballads— might be understood in relation to the history of religion.

Annotated Bibliography The Text Lyrical Ballads (1798) ed. W J B Owen. 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 1969. The simplest way to enjoy Lyrical Ballads as first published in 1798. Spartan, but with valuable notes. Lyrical Ballads 1805, ed. Derek Roper. 2nd edition. MacDonald & Evans, 1976. This edition includes all the poems included in successive editions, though in their later revised forms, with over 140 pages of valuable commentary and notes. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Cornell University Press, 1992. This expensive library edition in the Cornell Wordsworth (General Editor Stephen M Parrish) is the standard academic edition, essential for professional scholars.

Biography Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Much the best one volume biography available. There are more journalistic ones (Hunter Davies), more speculative ones (Kenneth R. Johnston) and longer ones (Juliet Barker) but this is the most authoritative biography since Mary Moorman’s two-volume William Wordsworth: a Biography (Oxford University Press, The Early Years, 1957 and The Later Years, 1965) and it has been very suggestive to critics of several different persuasions.

Critical Studies In addition to studies cited above, I would recommend the following: Roger Sharrock, ‘Wordsworth’s Revolt against Literature’, Essays in Criticism, 3, 1953. This essay may exaggerate the anti-literary, unconventional aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry, but it is a very readable and sympathetic account of Wordsworth’s significance and originality as a poet. Robert Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA 69, 1954. Without underestimating Wordsworth’s originality, Mayo’s article demonstrates how in many

Lyrical Ballads  90

ways the contents of Lyrical Ballads would—at first sight, anyway—have appealed to contemporary taste. He shows many of the features of Lyrical Ballads, the use of ballad stanza, the treatment of shepherds, beggars and vagrants, the interest in figures in landscape, were fashionable components of magazine poetry of the day. Readers may have been puzzled by what Wordsworth was doing with familiar material, but they would have supposed that the new volume was exactly the kind of thing with which they were familiar. Alun R Jones and W Tydeman, eds. Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads. Casebook. Macmillan, 1972. Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s ‘Songs’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Better on Blake than on Wordsworth (or to be more exact, more sympathetic to Blake than to Wordsworth), this book is of great value in showing how uncannily alike the experimentation of these two poets is, considering that neither knew the other. Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion. Oxford University Press, 2001. This work explores in sensitive and subtle detail the intimate poetic relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth and shows how their poetry conducts an ongoing dialogue, sometimes a slightly combative one. Nicholas Roe. Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd Edition (Illustrated). Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002. Shows how Wordsworth’s concept of benevolence relates to a widespread culture of dissenting radicalism. Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Palgrave 2003). Described by one reviewer ‘one of the most important studies of Wordsworth in recent years’. (Not surprisingly, I agree with this judgement!) Chapter 4 looks at the original context of ‘The Female Vagrant’; Chapter 5 overlaps with this Insight and looks at communicative strategies in Lyrical Ballads; Chapter 6 is on ‘Tintern Abbey’; Chapter 7 includes a reading of ‘Michael’, and Chapter 8 sees the ‘Lucy Poems’ in the context of Wordsworth’s elegies.

Lyrical Ballads  91

Internet Resources The Voice of the Shuttle, an exhaustive (and overwhelming) set of links covering all authors in the Romantic period: http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2750 A slightly less overwhelming guide to Romantic Links, Electronic Texts and Home Pages: http://www.english.upenn.edu/%7Emgamer/Romantic/ The Lyrical Ballads Bicentenary Project: http://etc.dal.ca/lballads/welcome.html The Wordsworth Trust Library and Museum, http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/ The Romantic Chronology, extremely useful year-by-year chronology listing writings and historical events: http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/ The electronic journal, Romanticism on the Net, http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/

Internal Hyperlinks The following pages contain, for reference, materials you may have visited already as hyperlinks

Conversation Poem Associated with Coleridge, this term refers to an informal poem, in blank verse, in which the relationship with one or more other persons is part of the subject matter. Usually these poems have a carefully described place and time, a meditation arising from the place and / or relationship, and a conclusion in which the meaning of the opening has been deepened: for instance the poem may open by describing a cottage scene, and close by emphasising the emotional significance of that setting. By the standards of late eighteenth century verse the style is conspicuously relaxed and the language sometimes idiomatic. Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale’, in Lyrical Ballads may not be a great poem (it is far from the best of Coleridge’s poems in this style) but it did help to create the style of Wordsworth’s closing poem in the volume, ‘Tintern Abbey’, in which the relationship with Dorothy is part of the subject matter. Since it is addressed to Coleridge, and can be read as an attempt to interpret his own life to Coleridge, Wordsworth’s great poem The Prelude could be regarded as the ultimate conversation poem.

Return to Text

Key Points of Romanticism While there is considerable debate as to the meaning of Romanticism, or its usefulness as a descriptive term, it is safe to say that the major Romantic poets in England shared the following beliefs and practices: • Individualism. Romanticism emphasized the importance of the individual, and the duty of self-development. As a Victorian thinker, Thomas Carlyle, put it: ‘The meaning of life here on earth may be defined as consisting in this: to unfold yourself’. • The Romantics stressed the brotherhood of man and the iniquity of all structures of oppression and division—of gender, race or class. They therefore preached Liberty. • Organicism. Most Romantics recognized mankind as a part of nature—part of the unfolding of ‘the life force’, not a separately created entity. • In psychology they are aware of the unconscious and the importance of dreams (to which a fascination with drugs is ancillary); recognized repression and neurosis; and understood the inadequacy of an account of human motivation based upon reason alone. • They understood the role of the mind in constituting its world and recognized that ‘reality’ is a problematic term. This is perhaps the real significance of the key term Imagination. • Defamiliarization. They celebrated the ordinary and everyday as mysterious and unfathomable (a key element in George Eliot’s aesthetic just as in the less technical of Coleridge’s definitions of imagination). • The understood the importance of childhood and of education. • In varying degrees they believed that that poetry can ‘call forth and bestow power’, as a sort of therapeutic instrument. Romantic art refuses to be passively understood. It requires the imaginative participation of the reader. • Free-Thinking. They shared a sense that all social and intellectual and ethical structures are open to challenge, and a realization that all values are of human origination, and that they evolve in a dialectical fashion. • Humanism. All the Romantics except Coleridge believed that the divine is a projection of human values, and that, consequently, ethical laws and religious myths are of human origination. Consequent upon this, all Romantic poets explored the myths of many different cultures.

Return to Text



James Gillray, ‘The British-Butcher’

In this cartoon, the Butcher of his nation is the prime Minister, William Pitt. The price of the joint he is offering a working man as ‘a substitute for bread’, is ‘a crown’ or five shillings. ‘Take it or leave it’ says the butcher. But it might as well be the crown jewels to a baker or shoemaker. On the butcher’s block a list of ‘Prices of Provisions’appears alongside a list of ‘Journeyman’s Wages’. As a loaf of bread or a pound of beef both cost a shilling, a shoemaker’s wage of ten shillings a week would buy one such joint and three loaves.

Return to Text

Extended Hyperlink  94

The French Revolution For observers in England the French Revolution, inaugurated by the Fall of the Bastille (France’s political prison) in 1789, symbolized the final overthrow of aristocratic power. Many saw it as completing the revolutionary triangle of England, America and Europe.   England had two revolutions in the seventeenth century, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when Parliament installed William of Orange as a constitutional monarch. The American Revolution took place in 1776, inspired largely by the English republican tradition and supported by those in England who believed that the Government had betrayed the principles of 1688.   Because it was generally assumed at first that the French Revolution would be a repetition of the American Revolution, almost the whole of the European intelligentsia—philosophers, composers, poets, educational reformers—welcomed the Revolution initially. In England, however, the political right, fearful for the overthrow of monarchy and the aristocracy, instituted their own reign of terror to silence enthusiasts.   The course of the Revolution was dominated in turn by: 1. a constituent assembly led by liberal intellectuals (including the Girondins and Brissotins with whom most English observers were connected) who attempted to run a constitutional monarchy based on a fairly wide electoral franchise; 2. the somewhat anarchist population of Paris (the ‘sans culottes’ or trouserless) who manned the barricades, invaded the palace and fuelled the terror; 3. the Jacobins (tough-minded, red-beret-wearing bourgeois republicans who used the populace to destroy the Girondins, guillotined thousand of opponents in the Great Terror of 1793-94, ran a heroic war effort to save their revolution, and fell victim to the guillotine themselves, in 1794; 4. a ‘Directory’, headed by Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a Girondin who survived the terror; 5. the military machine commanded by Napoleon, who became Consul in 1799, Consul for Life in 1802, and Emperor in 1804.

Continue >>

Extended Hyperlink  97 Chronology of the Revolution 1789 14 July. The Fall of the Bastille (celebrated throughout Europe) 29 August. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens. This liberal proclamation defines basic human rights. Some of its clauses are: 1. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights… 2. The end [purpose] of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptable rights of man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security and Resistance to Oppression… 4. Political liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another… 6. The law is an expression of the will of the community… 10. No man ought to be molested on account of his religious opinions… 11. Every citizen may speak, write and publish freely… 1790 13 July. Wordsworth and Jones arrive in France to walk to Italy 1791 Tom Paine publishes part 1 of The Rights of Man Wordsworth returns to France, attends the National Assembly, meets other English sympathisers in Paris and goes on to Orleans 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wordsworth meets Michel Beaupuy (a republican officer, later General) September: The September Massacres, mainly of political prisoners October: Wordsworth in Paris on his way to England Start of the Jacobin Republic headed by Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of 1793 Public Safety January: Louis XVI is executed February: France declares war on England (England is now allied with Austria and Prussia against France) William Godwin publishes An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, a rationalist account of the principle of perfecting human society Wordsworth writes (but does not publish) his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff justifying violent revolution October: Robespierre, Danton and St Just begin to arrest and execute their opponents; Wordsworth may have witnessed the execution of Gorsas February: Robespierre’s Essay on Political Moralitydefines political terror as ‘justice 1794 that is prompt, severe, and inflexible’ and thus ‘an emanation of virtue’ May: William Pitt’s cabinet sends twelve English radicals—including John Thelwall, Thomas Hardy of the London Corresponding Society and Horne Tooke (all friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge)—to the Tower of London on charges of treason. July: Robespierre himself is executed; and Wordsworth and others expect the Revolution 1794 to return to peaceful progress

Continue >>

End of Hyperlink  98

1795 1796 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1802 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1812 1813 1815

France occupies the Netherlands and Switzerland Coleridge gives political lectures in Bristol and Wordsworth writes his play The Borderers, both considering how the idealism of men like Robespierre can lead to remorseless crime Napoleon ‘liberates’ Italy Switzerland forced to become a Republic Lyrical Ballads published Napoleon becomes Consul. Coleridge encourages Wordsworth to write a poem to encourage those who have lost their idealism ‘in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution’ Wordsworth moves to Grasmere Second edition of Lyrical Ballads (2 volumes) France annexes Switzerland Napoleon becomes Consul for Life During the Peace of Amiens, Wordsworth visits Calais to see Annette Vallon and his daughter Caroline prior to marrying Mary Hutchinson Coronation of Napoleon Defeat of Austria Nelson’s victory in the Battle of Trafalgar Defeat of Prussia Defeat of Russia. Annexation of Spain Bonapartist Monarchy imposed on Spain Start of Tyrolean and Iberian Guerilla resistance to France. Wordsworth and Byron attack Wellington and the British Government for concluding The Convention of Cintra, which allows a defeated French Army to leave Spain unhindered Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow Napoleon defeated at Leipzig Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo is celebrated by Wordsworth and mourned by Byron

Return to Text

Extended Hyperlink  99 The Revolution Debate in England On 4 November 1789 the Reverend Richard Price gave an address called ‘A Discourse on the love of our Country’ to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. Price was both a non-conformist minister and a serious economist, who was held in high regard in the United States. He welcomed the French Revolution as belatedly establishing liberty on the continent of Europe and promising an era of peace and liberty throughout the world. His address insisted that the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had established three principles: “First, the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters. Secondly, the right to resist power when abused, and Thirdly, the right to chuse our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves.”   In 1790 Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he scorned Price’s arguments. ‘This new and hitherto unheard of bill of rights, though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to these gentlemen and their faction only. The body of the people of England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim it’. According to Burke, ‘we receive, we hold and transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives’. That is, we must hand on political institutions to our successors in the form in which we receive them from our ancestors. The parliamentary acts following the Revolution Settlement of 1688 ‘bind us, our heirs and our posterity …to the end of time’. Burke had supported the American colonists in their struggle for liberty, but he regarded the French Revolution, even its early days when almost everybody of liberal opinions welcomed it, and long before any remarkable excesses had taken place, as heading for tyranny.   Burke’s Reflections inspired numerous replies, including Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1791), and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), James Mackintosh’s Vindicae Gallicae (A Vindication of France, 1791) and William Godwin’s philosophical Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) which examined the rights and wrongs of all human institutions from education to marriage. But the most effective reply was Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (Part 1, February 1791; Part 2, February 1792). Paine, who had inspired the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense in 1776, defended Price and France from Burke’s attack. In Paine’s brilliant rhetoric, ‘Man has no property in Man’; and ‘It is the living and not the dead who are to be accommodated’. Throughout his work he played on the weakness of Burke’s position: ‘I am contending for the

Continue >>

End of Hyperlink  100

rights of the living, as against their being willed … by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead’. When there is a conflict between what may be thought right and convenient at different points in history. ‘who is to decide, the living or the dead?’   Wordsworth was undoubtedly with Paine and Godwin in the 1790s. By the time Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, in 1798, Mackintosh had swung around to Burke’s view; Wordsworth, who had not, included an epigraph in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, indicating that his radical poems would not be to such a turncoat’s taste. Even in 1805, when he finished he first full-length version of The Prelude, Wordsworth lamented how ‘good men fall off’—i.e. return to reactionary views, though by then he had come to see the perils of violent revolution, and acquired some sympathy with Burke’s belief in gradual change. As an avid supporter of the American Revolution (settled by the Treaty of Paris when he was 13) and a lifelong admirer of George Washington, Wordsworth called the wars with America (1776– 1783) and France (1794–1802) Britain’s ‘two wars against liberty’.   Like most oppositionists, Wordsworth saw Pitt’s Tory government as betraying Britain’s own steps towards liberty in the seventeenth century revolutions—i.e. both Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 which established constitutional monarchy. Many of Wordsworth’s closest associates were members of organizations like the London Corresponding Society, or the Society for Constitutional Information, which kept alive the republican ideas of the 17th century, welcomed the Revolution in France, and kept up a sustained critique of governmental wrong-doings. His own eventual position probably reconciled aspects of Paine with aspects of Burke, and he wrote in his poem that ‘There is one great society on earth / The noble living and the noble dead’. Extracts from these and other works can be read in Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Return to Text

Extended Hyperlink  101

Poetic Metres All words, in isolation, have at least one accented syllable, and some have two (as does isolation). Apart from these inbuilt accents, which sometimes move according to the grammar (as in project and project or accent and accentuate) the rules of intonation require emphasis on significant terms (did you mean that? are you sure you wanted the blue one?). These features mean that speech has meaningful but usually irregular rhythm. In most poetry there is a tension between this kind of meaningful but fluid rhythm and a stricter underlying metre which has the pleasure of predictability.   In classical verse metre was based on the length of syllables. In English verse metre is governed by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Stress can be made up of several elements – the inbuilt accent or length of a word, and deliberate emphasis through changes of pitch or volume. The terms used in scanning poetry are adapted from Greek and Latin. Metre is classified, and recognised, by two things: 1. the type of metrical unit (or foot) of which the lines are mainly built; and 2. the number of feet that occur in an average line. A poetic line is described in terms of how many ‘feet’ it contains, and what kind of feet they are. Feet are defined by the number and position of their syllables. The commonest types have only one stressed syllable and one or two unstressed ones, and the most sensible first step in deciding what metre a poem uses is to work out which syllables you would naturally emphasise if you were saying the poem, as opposed to merely reading it. There are two categories of feet, those with two syllables and those with three. A. Duple (disyllabic)Metres an Iamb (adj. iambic) is a foot of two syllables where the second is stressed (x /); e.g. ‘remind’. The is the most common metre in English. It is the metre of almost all poetic drama, and of the solemn meditative poetry of Milton and Wordsworth. a Trochee (adj. trochaic) has two syllables, the first strong, the second weak (/ x); e.g. ‘metre’, London. Trochaic verse can sound excited or very emphatic. a Spondee (adj. spondaic) is a foot of two syllables, both strong. A ‘black bird’ ( / / ), as opposed to a blackbird (trochaic), is a spondee. The effect is ponderous. a Pyrrhic is a foot of two syllables, both weak ( x x ), and in English would only occur in spare phrases such as ‘in a’. You could not have a pyrrhic line.

Continue >>

Extended Hyperlink  102 B. Triple (trisyllabic) Metres Triple metres tend to be spoken faster than duple metres, simply because there are twice as many unstressed syllables and (as a very crude rule of thumb) one line of poetry occupies the same time as another. an Anapaest (adj. anapaestic) has three syllables (x x / )with the stress on the last syllable; e.g. ‘as you wish’. The metre can sound either cheerful or galloping. a Dactyl (adj. dactylic) has three syllables, the first stressed ( / x x ) as in ‘counsellor’ or celery. It is similar to the anapaest in its speed, but can sound more violent. an Amphibrach is a stressed syllable between two unstressed (x / x). e.g. ‘delighted’, Chicago, amphibrach. an Amphimacer is equally uncommon: a weak syllable between two stressed ones (/ x /) as in Amsterdam or Chris-ta-bel. Feet with stress at the end (iambs and anapaests) are called ‘rising’ rhythm; feet that end on unstressed syllables (trochees and dactyls) are called ‘falling’ and the last two feet above (rarer in English) are sometimes called ‘rocking’. Although the examples above use single words to illustrate ‘feet’, in real lines of poetry a single word may form part of two or more feet. In the examples of iambic pentameter below, the words Lo-tos, ba-rren and sum-mer are all split: Lines, or line lengths, are classified as follows: monometer = one foot per line dimeter = two trimeter = three tetrameter = four pentameter = five hexameter = six (also called an Alexandrine) heptameter = seven So a poetic line may range in length from two syllables (‘And find / What wind ...’ Donne) to as many as twenty one syllables (an anapaestic heptameter). Examples of Poetic Lines iambic pentameter ‘I may, I must, I can, I will, I do’ (Sidney) ‘The Lotos blooms below the barren peak’ (Tennyson) ‘Shall I compare thee ^ to a summer’s day’ (Shakespeare)

Continue >>

End of Hyperlink  103

The first of these shows why a perfectly regular iambic line is so rare! Tennyson’s line is almost perfectly regular, but Shakespeare’s has at least two irregularities. No competent reader would stress the word ‘to’ rather than ‘thee’, or fail to pause after ‘thee’, and most would reverse the first foot—to emphasise that the sonnet starts with a question. Trochaic tetrameter Mary, Mary, quite contrary (traditional) Let us | go and | make our | visit (T. S. Eliot, ‘Prufrock’) Anapaestic tetrameter To the lords |of conven|tion ’twas Clav|erse who spoke (Burns) Dactylic tetrameter (with a trochee in the last foot) Just for a | handful of | silver he | left us (Browning) Mixed metres Pure forms are in fact quite rare. Most iambic lines will have some trochees. And it is very unusual to find pure dactylic or anapaestic lines in English. They are usually mixed with iambs, as in Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song’. Its opening line has four anapaests: ‘When the voi/ces of chil/dren are heard / on the green’. This sounds jolly enough—but the rhythm slows in lines three and four as envy takes over: The days / of my youth / rise fresh / in my mind [2 iambs, 2 anapaests] My face / turns green / and pale. [3 iambs] Scansion is not an exact science – the third line could be heard equally well as mixing amphibrachs and iambs: ‘The days of / my youth / rise fresh in / my mind’. What is clear is that the emboldened words require stress, whichever way we scan it.   It is helpful in fixing the pattern of these feet in the mind, and in remembering their names, to learn the first few lines of Coleridge’s mnemonic written for his son in 1803: Trochee trips from long to short; [trochaic: / x / x / x / ] From long to long in solemn sort [iambic: x / x / x / x /] Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able [spondaic // // // for three feet] Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable [dactylic / xx / xx / xx / xx]. Iambics march from short to long [iambic: x / x / x / x /]; With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng [xx / xx / xx / xx /]

Return to Text

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/catalogue History The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Methodism and Society Southern Africa

Literature Insights (by author) Chatwin: In Patagonia Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, George: Silas Marner Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Heaney: Selected Poems Hopkins: Selected Poems Hughes: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Morrison: Beloved Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

Literature Insights (general) English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Business Ethics Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Heidegger Informal Logic and Critical Thinking Islamic Philosophy Marxism Meta-Ethics Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Sport Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wittgenstein

General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Commissioned Titles Include Aesthetics Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell Eliot: Four Quartets Fielding: Tom Jones Lawrence: Selected Poems Mental Causation Plato Plato’s Republic Renaissance Philosophy Shakespeare: Macbeth Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Wonder