Poems

Overview

Wordsworth wrote for sixty years and most of it is not read. What programs assign, and what this entry covers, is a selection drawn from three groups: the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and 1800, written with Coleridge; the Poems in Two Volumes of 1807, his greatest single collection; and The Prelude, the long autobiographical poem he worked on from 1798 until his death and never published, which appeared three months after he died in 1850.

The life shapes the work more than usual. Orphaned young, sent to school at Hawkshead in the Lake District with unusual freedom to roam. At Cambridge without distinction. In France in 1791 and 1792, ardent for the Revolution, with a love affair that produced a daughter, Caroline, whom he had to leave when war made return impossible. Then the Terror, the disillusion, and a period of something close to breakdown. Then Dorothy, his sister, whose journals he drew on constantly, and Coleridge, and the two most productive years any English poet has had.

The later Wordsworth became conservative, orthodox, Poet Laureate, and much less interesting. Shelley and Browning both wrote poems about the disappointment. The verdict has stuck: the great work is between 1797 and 1807.

Stephen Gill’s Oxford selection is the one to use, because it prints the 1805 Prelude rather than the revised 1850 text, and the early versions of the poems, which are generally better.

The argument

Lyrical Ballads and the Preface. The 1798 volume was published anonymously and contained Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and nineteen poems of Wordsworth’s. The Preface came with the second edition in 1800 and is the manifesto.

Its claims: that the subject of poetry should be incidents from common life; that these should be treated in a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation; that poetic diction, the specialised vocabulary of eighteenth-century verse, is a corruption; and that there is no essential difference between the language of prose and that of metrical composition.

Then the two definitions everyone quotes, which sit oddly together. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. And, several pages later, it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity, contemplated until the tranquillity gradually disappears and an emotion kindred to the original one is produced. The second is the more accurate account of how Wordsworth worked.

The poems themselves are stranger than the theory. Simon Lee, the old huntsman who cannot cut a root and weeps when the narrator does it for him. The Thorn, narrated by a retired sea captain who may be unreliable. We Are Seven, a child who will not accept that two of her siblings are dead. Michael, a shepherd whose son goes to the city and is ruined, and who goes on visiting the unfinished sheepfold, which is one of the great English poems about work and loss.

Tintern Abbey. Composed in 1798 in his head during a walking tour and written down without alteration. It is the model for a form that Coleridge, Keats and everyone after used: a meditation in blank verse, located in a specific place and time, that moves from description to memory to a general reflection and returns.

Its subject is the difference between two visits five years apart. The first was appetite, a bodily passion for the landscape; now the gladness is gone and what replaces it is the ability to hear the still sad music of humanity and to feel a presence interfused through everything. The compensation is stated carefully and the poem knows it is a compensation.

The last section turns to Dorothy, walking beside him, in whom he sees his former self, and asks that when he is gone she will remember this.

The Lucy poems. Five short lyrics written in Germany in 1798 and 1799 about the death of an unidentified girl. Nobody knows who Lucy was or whether she existed. They are the plainest poems Wordsworth wrote and the most effective: a slumber did my spirit seal, and now she is rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, which is either consolation or its total absence, and readers have divided on that for two hundred years.

Poems in Two Volumes, 1807. The best collection. It contains the Immortality Ode, Resolution and Independence, the great sonnets, and the daffodils poem that has been read to death.

The Ode is the central document of Wordsworth’s mature position. The celestial light of childhood has faded; heaven lies about us in our infancy; the growing boy sees it further off, and at length the man perceives it die away. Wordsworth explains this with the doctrine of pre-existence, that the soul comes from elsewhere trailing clouds of glory, which he later said he used as a poetic device rather than as a belief. The poem does not end in grief: it finds strength in what remains behind, in primal sympathy and the faith that looks through death, and in the thought that the meanest flower can give thoughts too deep for tears.

Resolution and Independence is the other great poem here. The speaker, elated on a bright morning, falls into dejection about the fate of poets, Chatterton dead at seventeen, Burns dead at thirty-seven, and meets an ancient leech-gatherer on a moor, who answers his questions with dignity and whose speech he stops hearing while continuing to see him, like a man from some far region sent. The old man’s endurance shames him out of his self-pity.

The sonnets include Westminster Bridge, written on the roof of a coach at dawn with the city quiet, and the London 1802 sonnet beginning Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

The Prelude. Thirteen books in the 1805 version, fourteen in the revised 1850, about eight thousand lines of blank verse, addressed throughout to Coleridge. Wordsworth called it the poem on the growth of my own mind and intended it as the prelude to a vast philosophical poem, The Recluse, which he never wrote.

It proceeds by episodes. The boy stealing a boat on Ullswater and seeing a huge peak rear up behind the ridge and stride after him, so that for days afterwards there was a darkness in his mind. Skating at night, stopping short, and feeling the cliffs wheel past as the earth turns. Robbing birds’ nests and hearing low breathings coming after him. The stolen woodcock. The drowned man rising from Esthwaite Water.

These are the spots of time: moments of ordinary or frightening experience that were not understood when they happened and that retain a renovating virtue, nourishing the mind afterwards. It is a theory of how a person is made, and it puts childhood at the centre of the account in a way nothing before it had.

The later books cover Cambridge, London, and France. The revolutionary books are the most historically interesting: his enthusiasm, the friendship with Beaupuy, the argument that bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and then the Terror, England’s declaration of war which he says threw his moral nature out of joint, his period of trying to build a moral system from pure reason under Godwin’s influence, and the collapse of that attempt into despair.

The recovery is the poem’s climax, attributed to Dorothy and to nature, and it ends with the ascent of Snowdon at night, where the poet climbs through mist into moonlight above a sea of cloud with a chasm roaring below, and reads the scene as an image of a mind that feeds upon infinity.

How to read it

Start with Tintern Abbey, the Lucy poems, Michael, Resolution and Independence, the Immortality Ode and the Westminster Bridge sonnet. That is a manageable selection and it is most of what matters outside The Prelude.

Then read The Prelude Books I and II entire, and Books IX to XI on France, and the Snowdon passage at the end of Book XIII. That is perhaps a quarter of the poem and it is the best of it.

Use the 1805 text. The revisions Wordsworth made over forty-five years generally made the poem more orthodox and less alive.

Read the Preface, but read it after some of the poems, and notice where the practice differs from the theory. The claim about the real language of men is not obviously true of the blank verse, which is elevated and elaborate.

Be patient with the flatness. Wordsworth at his worst is very flat, and he is flat inside poems that are otherwise magnificent. This is a cost of his method and not an accident; he was deliberately refusing the ornament that would have covered it.

Read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria chapters 14 and 17 to 20 for the best criticism ever written of Wordsworth, by the man who knew the poems from the inside and disagreed with the Preface.

And notice how much is about loss. The visionary gleam gone, the girl dead and unnoticed, the sheepfold unfinished, the revolution betrayed, the five years since the last visit. The poetry that gets called nature poetry is nearly always about something that cannot be had again.

Questions it raises

• Is there really a real language of men, and does Wordsworth write in it?
• The Immortality Ode says the compensation for the lost gleam is the philosophic mind. Is that consolation or resignation?
• What kind of evidence is a childhood memory, if the meaning of it only arrives decades later?
• Keats called this the egotistical sublime. Is a long poem about one’s own mind self-knowledge or self-absorption?
• Wordsworth put the poor and the old at the centre of his poems and grew politically conservative. Are those in tension?
• Nature educates the boy through fear as much as through beauty. What is nature in these poems, and does it need to be anything more than what he calls it?