Recently I led a
small on-line discussion group about Wordsworth. I do not pretend to be a
scholar of the subject, but my notes might be of interest. There were a few
short quotations that I distributed beforehand.
Four critics
Thomas Hutchinson: “1792 – Nature now yields the first place
to Man in Wordsworth’s affections and imagination”
Francis Jeffrey (1802): “The love, or grief, or indignation
of an enlightened and refined character is…in itself a different emotion from
the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown [a peasant], a tradesman, or a
market-wench”
Thomas de Quincey: “Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was
trampled underfoot; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has
been triumphant”
John Keble, on the occasion of Wordsworth being made a
Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford: “One who alone among poets has set the manners,
the pursuits and the feelings, religious and traditional, of the poor not
merely in a good but…even in a celestial light”
Poetry
Poems written in youth
1789 (“An Evening Walk”)
The song of mountain streams,
unheard by day,
Now hardly heard, beguiles my
homeward way.
Air listens, like the sleeping
water still,
To catch the spiritual music of
the hill.
1792 (“Descriptive sketches taken
during a pedestrian tour among the Alps”)
Still, Nature, ever just, to him
imparts
Joys only give to uncorrupted
hearts
Poems referring to the period
of childhood
1798 (“Influence of natural
objects”)
Thus from my
first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine
for me
The passions that build up our
human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works
of Man
But with high objects, with
enduring things.
With life and nature….
Poems founded on the affections
1798 (“The Idiot Boy”)
She kisses o’er and o’er again
Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy;
She’s happy here, is happy there,
She is uneasy everywhere;
Her limbs are all alive with joy.
Poems of the fancy
1802 (“To the Daisy”)
An instinct call it, a blind
sense;
A happy, genial influence,
Coming one knows not how, nor
whence….
Poems of the Imagination
1798 (“There was a boy”)
…a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the
voice
Of mountain torrents; or the
visible scene
Would enter unawares into its mind
With all its solemn imagery.
1804 (“I wandered lonely as a
cloud”)
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
1798 (“Lines composed a few miles
above Tintern Abbey”)
For she
[Nature] can so inform
The mind that s within us, so
impress
With quietness and beauty, and so
feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither
evil tongues
Rash judgements, nor the sneers of
selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness
is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily
life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or
disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which
we behold
Is full of blessings.
Memorials of a tour of Scotland
1803
1807 (“At the grave of Burns”)
I mourned with thousands, but as
one
More deeply grieved, for He was
gone
Whose light I hailed when first it
shone,
And showed my youth
How Verse may build a princely
throne
On humble truth.
Independence and Liberty
1802 (“To Toussaint L’Ouverture”)
Thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations,
agonies,
And loved, and man’s unconquerable
mind.
The River Duddon
1820 (“Sonnet V”)
Mid sheltering pines, this Cottage
rude and grey;
Whose ruddy children by the
mother’s eyes
Carelessly watched, sport through
the summer day,
Thy pleased associates: - light as
endless May
On infant bosoms lonely nature
lies.
Poems of sentiment and reflection
1798 (“The tables turned”)
And hark! How blithe the throstle
sings!
He too is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of
things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.
1806
Spade! with which Wilkinson hath
tilled his lands,…..
Health, meekness, ardour,
quietness secure
And industry of body and of mind;
And elegant employments that are
pure
As nature is; - too pure to be
refined.
Ode: Intimations of immortality
1803
Thanks to the human heart by which
we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys
its tears,
To me the meanest flower that
blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep
for tears.
Letters
1798: “I have written 1300 lines of a poem which I hope to
make of considerable utility…”
1801: “The two poems which I have mentioned [“Michael” and
“The Brothers”] were written with a view to show that men who do not wear fine
cloaths can feel deeply.”
1802: I have 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.”
1806: To Thomas Wilkinson (1806) “On the other page you will
find a copy of verses addressed to an implement of yours; they are supposed to
have been composed that afternoon when we were labouring together in your
pleasure ground…”
1807: “Trouble not yourself upon their [his poems] present
reception; of what moment is that compared to 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 to become more actively and securely virtuous….”
1808: “One of our Neighbours was yesterday walking with me,
he suddenly said to me: “I like to walk where I can hear the sound of a Beck. I
cannot but think that this Man, without being conscious of it has had many
devout feelings connected with the appearances which have presented themselves
to him in his employment as a Shepherd, and the pleasure of his heart was an
acceptable offering to the divine Being.”
1810, to his wife: “Oh Mary I love you with a passion of
love which grows till I tremble to think of its strength.”
1815: “Do you not perceive that my conversations [in “The
Excursion”] all take place out of Doors, and all with grand objects of nature
surrounding the speakers for the express purpose of their being alluded to in
illustration of the subjects treated of.”
1817: “Coleridge talks as a bird sings, as if he could not
help it; it is his nature.”
1820: “Nothing which I have seen ion this city [Paris] has
interested me at all like the Jardin des Plantes, with the living animals, and
the Museum of Natural History which it includes. Scarcely could I refrain from
tears of admiration at the sight of this apparently boundless exhibition of the
wonders of creation. The Statues and pictures of the Louvre affect me feebly by
comparison.”
1830: “Dear Sir Walter [Scott]! I love that man.”
1840: “Scarcely a week passes in which I do not receive
grateful acknowledgements of the good they [my poems] have done to the minds of
the several writers. They speak of the relief they have received from them
under affliction and in grief, and of the calmness and elevation of Spirit
which the Poems either give, or assist them in attaining.”
1844: The Editor of the Morning Post: “Rocks and mountains,
torrents and wide-spread waters, and all those features of nature which go to
the composition of such scenes as this part on England is distinguished for,
cannot, in their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even
very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or opportunities of
observation in some degree habitual.”
Before the discussion began I made a few observations to
get us started.
This is the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s
birth. My plan is that you should react to the various quotations I’ve sent out
and so the discussion will develop; so I hope you have had a chance to look at
them. They are all short, anyhow, so you could glance at them as we go.
But I have a few things to say before we start discussing.
Wordsworth has come under a lot of attack – government
agents kept an eye on him for his known radical ideas in the early 1790s when
being a radical was by no means safe, especially once the French wars began.
Then there were hostile critics in his own lifetime, most notably Francis
Jeffrey in the “Edinburgh Review”. Then there were fellow radicals who felt
that he had betrayed them by becoming a settled member of society with a
regular income as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland. Then in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were plenty more critics, loosely
defined, who saw him as a Victorian sentimentalist who wrote absurd poems about
leech gatherers and pretty poems about daffodils, but never got to any depth. That’s
just ignorant and wrong, of course. If I am trying to redress the balance that
does not mean that I’m putting him on a pedestal as someone who can do no
wrong, and all of whose poems were wonderful. But I do think he was a very
great poet indeed. His contribution to our Creationtide theme of Nature and
Wellbeing is enormous.
Secondly: It is worth reminding ourselves that he was an
enormously prolific poet. My collected poems has 698 pages of small print in
double columns.
He always insisted that his work should be seen as a whole,
not as separate bits. Individual poems about cuckoos or daisies or beggars may
seem a bit light weight in themselves but he intended them as bricks in an
edifice. He was a life-long reviser and rearranger. He insisted on the
categories I’ve used here. This sometimes irritated publishers and readers, but
he was determined. It is interesting that he placed as the last of his poems,
apart from “The Prelude” and “The Excursion”, his “Ode on The Intimations of
Immortality, From Recollections of Early Childhood”.
His great life’s work, “The Recluse” was never
completed. “The Excursion” was to be the
first part of it. It contains magnificent passages, but in the view of most,
doesn’t quite make it. I am going to read you a paragraph from a that Coleridge
wrote to him after he read “The Excursion”. It is only two sentences long, but
one of them is I think the longest sentence I have ever read. …….. The
exhilarating vision they had developed in Alfoxden could not quite be realised.
Mind you, it does contain some momentous passages. Here is
one that relates to our theme. In it the Wanderer tries to lift the Solitary
out of depression….
“The Prelude”, incidentally, was to be a prelude to this work.
Also, I expect you know, it was not published till after Wordsworth’s death.
Mentioning the “Prelude” I must mention Annette Vallon. It
is well known that they fell in love and conceived a child while Wordsworth, in
his early 20s, was in France at the start of the Revolution. The affair is
skirted round in the Prelude – more or less written out. What ought to be
remembered as well is these things.
In 1802, during the brief truce in the French wars,
Wordsworth and Dorothy visited France. They got no further than Calais, and
meeting Annette, and getting to know their 9 year-old daughter Caroline was one
of the most important parts of the trip.
1814: The French Wars over it was Mary who writes “something
handsome should be done for dear Caroline”, and they settled on her and her
husband £30.00 a year. They planned for Dorothy at least to go to the wedding,
but this was prevented by Napoleon’s return from Elba.
1820: William and Mary and Dorothy tour many of the places
William had visited in the early 1790s. This included a month in Paris, and we
learn of Mary and Annette meeting in the Louvre and Caroline – now a mother
herself – calling William “father”.
I hope lots of other points emerge in the discussion.
