WORDSWORTH: PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS

This preface, in which Wordsworth sets forth his theory of poetry, was prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, and enlarged and modified in subsequent issues to the shape in which it is here given.

504. b. 27-9. Catullus (87-47 B. C.), Terence (c.. 195-158 B. C.) and Lucretius (95-55 B. C.) belong to the earlier or classical period of Roman poetry; Statius (61-96 A. D.) and Claudian (fl. c. 400 A. D.) to the later or Silver Age.'

510. b. 26. Shakspere hath said. Hamlet IV, iv, 37. 513. a. 5. Clarissa Harlowe (1748), Richardson's. novel.

6. The Gamester (1753). A tragedy by Edward Moore portraying the horrors of gambling.

THE PRELUDE

As a

This poem is so called because it was intended to be introductory to a great philosophical poem Wordsworth planned on retiring to the Lake District in 1799, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live.' preliminary it seemed to him a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and education had qualified him for such an employment. The philosophical poem was to be divided into three parts, and only one of these. The Excursion, was ever finished. the introductory work, in which Wordsworth dertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress. of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with

But un

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them,' was completed in 1805, although it was not published till 1850, after the poet's death, when it was given the title, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an Autobiographical Poem. Our extract is taken from Book I, which was begun at Goslar, in Germany, and finished in the first year or two of Wordsworth's settlement at Grasmere. Lines 101-163 were published in 1809 in Coleridge's periodical The Friend. The whole poem was addressed to Coleridge as a dear friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the author's intellect is deeply indebted.' 516 2-4. Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, and in his ninth year was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in the Vale of Esthwaite.

517. 101-163. When Wordsworth published these lines in 1809 he gave them the title Growth of Genius from the Influence of Natural Objects on the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth.

101-114. The nominative of this whole sentence is 'thou,' referring to the Wisdom and Spirit of the universe,' addressed in the opening lines; the verb is didst intertwine '; and lines 108-114 are an extension of this predicate. By intertwining the passions with Nature, the Divine Spirit purifies and ennobles them; the very emotions of pain and fear, awakened by contact with Nature, gain a touch of Nature's grandeur.

133-7. What is meant exactly by shod with steel' and' games confederate '?

143. an alien sound. The weird echo from the distant hills seemed to come from another world. 150. reflex, the reflection of a star in the ice. 155. spinning still. To the swift skater, aided by the wind, the banks seem to be moving in the contrary direction, and their motion seems to continue for a moment or two even after he has stopped, the mental impression being retained.

LINES COMPOSED ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY Wordsworth wrote of this poem, originally pub lished in Lyrical Ballads: -No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my sister. Not

a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.'

The importance of this poem as an illustration of Wordsworth's view of Nature has been already touched on in the Introduction; but it cannot be urged too strongly. Myers says: To compare small things with great-or, rather, to compare great things with things vastly greater the essential spirit of the Lines near Tintern Abbey was for practical purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men indifferent, it may be, to literary or poetical effects, as such he has shown by the subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer - an opening. if indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.'

518. 1-2. Wordsworth's earlier visit was made, alone and on foot, in 1793.

3-5. The Wye Valley, above Tintern Abbey, is, perhaps, the most beautiful river scenery in England. Although only a few miles from the sea, the stream is free from the influence of the tide; and rocks, meadows, and wooded cliffs combine to make the scene one of romantic loveliness.

23-50. The memory has been a consolation to the poet amid the noise and loneliness of city life (2331); it has given him, too, feelings of pleasure, which he no longer remembers, but which, he is sure, have had their influence on his moral character (31-36); and, finally, when perplexed by the mysteries of human life, he has been uplifted by the recollection of Nature's loveliness to a mood, in which the soul, endowed with spiritual insight, penetrates beyond material things to the secret of life, and sees with joy the divine harmony underly ing the apparent contradictions of the world (3650).

56. Have oppressed my spirits.

66-111. Wordsworth in this passage distinguishes three periods in his relation to Nature. In the first, Nature merely offered opportunity for boyish pleasures, such as bird-nesting, rowing, and skating, described in the extract from The Prelude; in the second he took delight in the forms and colors of the woods and mountains and the sound of the waterfalls - a delight of ey and ear only, for he was as yet insensible

every object in Nature as pervaded by the Spirit of God. The Prelude, Book II, 396-409.

108. Wordsworth noted the resemblance of this line to Young's Night-Thoughts, in which it is said that Our senses, as our reason, are divine,' ' And half-create the wondrous world they see.'

110. In nature as revealed and interpreted by the

senses.

114-122. Dorothy Wordsworth was a little younger than her brother, and even in her childhood was a refining influence in his life. See what he writes of her in The Sparrow's Nest, p. 527. From childhood they were separated until they were both over twenty, when Dorothy became, not only her brother's constant companion and helper, but a hallowing influence in the crisis of his life.

128. inform, mold, inspire.

152. Of past existence, of my own past life. Cf.

119-123.

STRANGE FITS OF PASSION

This and the four following poems belong to what is known as the Lucy' group of lyrics, written in Germany in 1799. Nothing is known of the English maiden so beautifully and devoutly enshrined; she may have existed only in the poet's imagination. 520. 2. Dove, a river in the English Midlands. 6. diurnal course, daily revolution.

MICHAEL

This poem was written in Oct.-Dec., 1800, largely at the sheep-fold in Green-head Ghyll, round which the subject is centered. Wordsworth said to Mr. Justice Coleridge that there was some foundation in fact, however slight, for every poem he had ever written of a narrative kind. 'Michael was founded on the son of an old couple having become dissolute, and run away from his parents; and on an old shepherd having been seven years in building up a sheep-fold in a solitary valley.' He wrote on another occasion: 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 labor 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 to them from their ancestors, the power which these affections acquire amongst such men is inconceivable by those who have only had an opportunity of ob serving hired laborers, 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 on which they are written, which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise be forgotten. It is a fountain fitted to the nature of social man, from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was intended for, are daily drawn. This class of men is rapidly disappearing.'

MY HEART LEAPS UP WHEN I BEHOLD Wordsworth adopted the last three lines of this little poem (written in 1802) as the motto of the great Ode on Immortality, which was begun about a year later. Piety' is used in its original sense of reverence, affection. The meaning is that the man should cherish the love of Nature he feels as a child, so that it may be a continuous inspiration, running through all his life. The sense in which the child is father of the man' is explained more fully in the Ode. (See p. 535.)

THE SPARROW'S NEST

Written at Grasmere in 1801. The nest was in the hedge of the garden at Cockermouth in which William and Dorothy Wordsworth played as children. In the poem as originally composed, 1. 9 read: My sister Dorothy and I.' As to Dorothy Wordsworth see note on Tintern Abbey, 114-122, above.

RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE

Written at Grasmere, 1802. This old man I met a few hundred yards from my cottage; and the account of him is taken from his own mouth. I was in the state of feeling described in the beginning of the poem, while crossing over Barton fell from Mr. Clarkson's, at the foot of Ullswater, towards Askham. The image of the hare I then observed on the ridge of the fell.' (Wordsworth's note.)

528. 12. plashy, marshy, swampy, boggy. 43. Chatterton. See pp. 377 and 390. 45. Him. Burns. See p. 490.

TO A YOUNG LADY

Written 1802. The poem refers either to Dorothy Wordsworth or to Mary Hutchinson - prob. ably to the former.

530. 17. a Lapland night. In the far north at a certain season of the year the sun does not sink be low the horizon. The winter nights are often calm and still.

THE SOLITARY REAPER

Suggested to Wordsworth by the following sen tence in the MS. of his friend Wilkinson's Tours to the British Mountains: Passed a female who was reaping along; she sang in Erse, as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard; her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious long after they were heard no more.'

YARROW UNVISITED

'At Clovenford, being so near to the Yarrow, we could not but think of the possibility of going thither, but came to the conclusion of reserving the pleasure for some future time, in consequence of which, after our return, William wrote the poem which I shall here transcribe.'- From Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland, 1803.

When Scott sent The Lay of the Last Minstrel to Wordsworth, the latter returned a copy of these verses by way of acknowledgment. Scott in reply

Wordsworth subsequently complained that Scott in one of his novels mis-quoted lines 43-44 of this poem, printing swans instead of swan.' He added Never could I have written swans in the plural. The scene, when I saw it with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness: there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan, its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the Swan and its Shadow. Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of that place: and I should have said nothing about them.'

530. 6. Marrow, companion. Dorothy Wordsworth. 20. lintwhites, linnets, small singing birds.

33. holms, flat and low-lying pieces of ground by a river, surrounded or submerged in time of flood. 531. 37. Strath, valley.

SHE WAS A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT The subject of this poem, written in 1804, is Mary Hutchinson, whom Wordsworth had married two years before.

22. machine. This word has been objected to as unpoetical. But cf. Hamlet II, ii, 124: whilst this machine is to him?'

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD Wordsworth says: 'The daffodils grew and still grow on the margin of Ullswater, and probably may be seen to this day as beautiful in the month of March, nodding their golden heads beside the dancing and foaming waves.'

Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal has the following entry under April 15, 1802: When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. As went along there were more, and yet more; and, at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore.

.

we

I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones, about and above them; some rested their heads on these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing."

21-2. These lines, said by Wordsworth to be the best in the poem, were contributed by his wife. For the thought of this stanza cf. Tintern Abbey, lines 23-36.

TO A SKY-LARK

Cf. Shelley's poem with the same title (p. 627) and Meredith's The Lark Ascending (p. 960).

ELEGIAC STANZAS

There are two Peele Castles, one in the Isle of Man, the other on the coast of Lancashire. The latter is the one referred to in the poem, Wordsworth being known to have spent a four-weeks' vacation in its neighborhood.

ODE ON IMMORTALITY

Of this poem the very highest opinions have been expressed by competent judges. Principal Shairp says it marks the highest limit which the tide of poetic inspiration has reached in England since the days of Milton.' It is, therefore, worthy of the most careful study. The best help to understanding it is given in Wordsworth's own note: This was composed during my residence at Townend, Grasmere. Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or experiences of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have said elsewhere:

A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated. in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I comiauned with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines:

Obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things
Fallings from us, vanishings, etc.

To that dream-like vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood, every one. I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here; but having in the poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of immortality. But let us bear in mind that, though the idea is not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there to contradict it, and

the fall of man presents an analogy in its favour. Accordingly, a pre-existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations, and, among all persons acquainted with classic literature, is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy. Archimedes said that he could move the world if he had a point whereon to rest his machine, Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind? Having to wield some of its elements when I was impelled to write this poem on the "Immortality of the Soul," I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in hu manity for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a poet.'

Wordsworth's view of childish reminiscences of a previous existence was, however, probably not suggested by Plato, but by the seventeenth century poet Vaughan, in Childhood and The Retreat. 185.

See p.

102-7. Referring to Shakspere's well-known lines in As You Like It, II, vii, 139-166, All the world's a stage,' etc.

536. 112. the eternal deep, the deep mysteries of eternity.

126 earthly freight, burden of earthly cares.' (Webb.)

132. fugitive, evanescent, quickly disappearing. 141-5. Professor Bonamy Price, walking one day with Wordsworth by the side of Rydal Water, asked him the meaning of these lines: The venerable old man raised his aged form erect; he was walking in the middle, and passed across me to a fivebarred gate in the wall which bounded the road on the side of the lake. He clenched the top bar firmly with his right hand, pushed strongly against it, and then uttered these ever-memorable words, There was a time in my life when I had to push against something that resisted, to be sure that there was anything outside of me. I was sure of my own mind; everything else fell away and vanished into thought." Thought he was sure of; matter for him, at the moment, was an unreality.'

181. primal sympathy, the child's intuitive sympathy with Nature.

183-4. Cf. Tintern Abbey, lines 92-5 (p. 518).

185. through, beyond.

189. yet, still, even now.

196-9. The sunset has no longer a celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream,' but suggests serious reflections to the Man who has pondered on the issues of Life and Death. The poet's final thought is that acquaintance with the world, while robbing Nature of its first glory, increases its significance by awakening sympathy with the joys and sorrows of humanity. Professor Dowden has well observed that the last two lines of the Ode are ' often quoted as an illustration of Wordsworth's sensibility to external nature; in reality, they testify to his enriching the sentiment of nature with feeling derived from the heart of man and from the experience of human life.'

NUNS FRET NOT 537. 3. pensive citadels, refuges in which they can think, secure from interruption.

6. Furness-fells, the hills of the district of Furness, in or near which Wordsworth spent the greater part of his life.

8-9. Cf. Lovelace, To Althea from Prison, p. 182.

PERSONAL TALK, III

13. Desdemona in Othello.

14. See Spenser Faery Queen, 11. 27 ff. (p. 110). COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE Wordsworth appears to have been mistaken as to the date he assigned to this sonnet, which was written when he left London for Dover on his way to Calais early in the morning of July 30th, 1802. The following is the entry in his sister's diary under that date: 'Left London between five and six o'clock of the morning outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul's, with the river a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature's own grand spectacles.'

IT IS A BEAUTEOUS EVENING 538. 9. Dear Child! Dorothy Wordsworth. 12. Abraham's bosom. In the presence of God. See Luke xvi, 22.

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC

1-2. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Venetians, with the help of France, captured Constantinople, and added to their dominions a large part of the Eastern Empire. They protected Western Europe from the incursions of the Turks for centuries.

4. Venice was founded in the fifth century in the marshes of the Adriatic by inhabitants of the mainland who fled before the conquering Huns under Attila.

7-8. The Venetians having protected Pope Alexander III against the German Emperor, whom they defeated in a sea fight in 1177, the Pope gave the Doge a ring and bade him wed with it the Adriatic that posterity might know that the sea was subject