Poetry 1798–1807: Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes
‘Wordsworth’s name is nothing – to a large number of persons mine stinks’, wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, urging publisher Joseph Cottle to issue the poets’ co-authored Lyrical Ballads anonymously (STCL i 412). In the ensuing decade, Wordsworth, the man with the ‘nothing name’, wrote many of the poems that for later generations established him as the principal poet of his age. The change is from seeing Lyrical Ballads as Coleridge’s wife Sara early on described it – ‘laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted’ – to what is the current critical consensus: ‘Historically considered, it remains the most important volume of verse in English since the Renaissance, for it began modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.’1 Wordsworth’s achievement is all the more remarkable because most of the chief poems published in Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) came from a very few bursts of activity, first at Alfoxden in Somerset, then at Goslar in Germany, and eventually at Grasmere.
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
In the aging memories of the one-time collaborators on Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 volume had a straightforward division of labour. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) recalled that he was to write on ‘persons and characters supernatural’, while Wordsworth would concentrate on subjects from ‘ordinary life’, giving ‘the charm of novelty to things of every day’ and showing ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us . . .’ (BL ii 5–8). The seventy-three-year-old Wordsworth, in a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick about ‘We Are Seven’, agreed that his task was to write about subjects from common life but to treat them imaginatively.2 However, Wordsworth’s brief critical statement, or ‘Advertisement’, included in Lyrical Ballads (1798) emphasizes stylistic matters: the majority of the poems were ‘experiments’ written ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’.
As with most plans, though, what seemed so obvious to Wordsworth and Coleridge after Lyrical Ballads was published looks rather messy and haphazard at the start of their work on the book. In order to pay the expenses of a walking tour, the two poets began The Rime of the Ancient Mariner collaboratively in November 1797, but the poem soon became Coleridge’s alone. As for Wordsworth’s activity late in 1797 and early in 1798, he completed his play The Borderers, revised his tale of The Ruined Cottage by adding an account of the philosophic pedlar-narrator, and began an industrious programme of reading in preparation for his work on the vast philosophical poem The Recluse.
When plans for a trip to Germany emerged, the two poets first thought they could cover some costs by publishing a book with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and some of Wordsworth’s short pieces. Then they considered a volume with their two tragedies, Osorio and The Borderers. A third possibility called for a volume containing only Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage and Salisbury Plain. They entertained still other possibilities, but what ultimately produced Lyrical Ballads seems less a predetermined plan and more Wordsworth’s reactions to the simple, but still wondrous, change in seasons. Spring 1798 (from March to May) saw an extraordinary period of Wordsworth’s creative activity on lyrics and ballads.
In March 1798, Wordsworth’s first spring at Alfoxden House in a captivating rural setting overlooking the Bristol Channel, we clearly discern themes and techniques evolving toward what is now thought of as quintessentially Wordsworthian. Such accounts are sharply observed pictures of the natural world, expressed in everyday language. Many of these lyrics record the growth of the speaker’s perceptions as he creates and meditates upon his view of the world. Stanzas from the first of these poems are typical:
It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before,
The red-breast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above;
We’ll frame the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.
(1–4, 25–8, 33–6)
In a later poem, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, the ‘powers’ inherent in the natural world ‘impress’ themselves upon the mind and ‘feed’ it (21–3). In the companion ‘The Tables Turned’, the addressee is urged to quit his search for wisdom in books and to trust in the intuitive rather than in the rational: ‘Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher’ (15–16). Children’s reactions, of course, are frequently emotional and intuitive, and Wordsworth’s older speakers in such dramatic ballads as ‘We Are Seven’ and ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ have their irritatingly rational search for adult answers corrected, as they learn from the simply phrased perceptions of the children whom they question. With a shock, those adult speakers, and we as readers, become aware of an alternative and truer reality: ‘Could I but teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn’ (‘Anecdote for Fathers’, 59–60).
Equally characteristic of Wordsworth, though, is that ‘pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind’. The joy of the Alfoxden spring takes place amidst the poverty and anguish of neighboring common men and women: ‘Have I not’, Wordsworth writes, echoing Robert Burns, ‘reason to lament / What man has made of man?’ (‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, 3–4, 23–4). A general shortage of bread in the mid-1790s is in the background of several of Wordsworth’s poems, as is the destitution which caused a tripling in Alfoxden-area rates for poor relief between 1792 and 1802.3 In that other highly influential work of 1798, Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, the economist looked at contemporary conditions and gloomily explained why population growth would always outpace the food supply. The landscape of Lyrical Ballads (1798) is thus peopled not only by joyful poets of creative natural perceptions but by mad mothers, idiot boys, starving and freezing old women, terrified and despairing convicts, shepherds reduced to public relief, American Indian women abandoned to die. Some of these poems cast into ballad form, such as ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’, are unadorned, wrenching monologues portraying bleak suffering.
In the best of these poems, however, Wordsworth merges his humanitarian concerns with an interest – fostered by his recent work on The Borderers and on The Ruined Cottage – in the psychology not only of the victim but also of the poet-narrator who, interacting with the sufferer, tells the tale. In ‘Simon Lee’, for example, we hear of the old huntsman in a bouncing rhythm that fights with the more serious subject matter:
Full five and twenty years he lived
A running huntsman merry:
And, though he has but one eye left,
His cheek is like a cherry.
(13–16)
Before we can think too much about that one remaining eye, Wordsworth gives us the cheerful image of Simon’s ruddy cheeks. The rhythm and imagery make the huntsman a figure of fun, perhaps even of mockery. Simon Lee, the all-purpose picturesque peasant, seems not to be anyone for whom either narrator or reader need feel much responsibility, especially if that reader is an upper-class consumer of poetry. For sixty-eight increasingly dithering lines Simon Lee is described, but we hear not a whisper of narrative, the staple of the ballad form. Wordsworth even playfully mocks our expectations:
My gentle reader, I perceive
How patiently you’ve waited,
And I’m afraid that you expect
Some tale will be related.
(69–72)
What we finally reach is a brief ‘tale’ of Simon Lee’s inability to cut out an old tree root and of how the narrator impatiently takes the axe from him, severing that root with a single blow. There is here hardly any story – let alone the sensational events associated with most traditional ballads and the revival of the genre in the eighteenth century. Wordsworth introduces what plot there is with the comment that there is a tale in everything and ‘Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’ (80), anticipating his remark in the ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (1800): ‘I should mention one other circumstance which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day: it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling’ (LB, 746). The ‘action and situation’ of the narrator’s axe-wielding is in itself nothing; what gives that incident its importance is indeed the feeling, first of Simon Lee, then of the narrator, and finally of the reader:
The tears into his eyes were brought,
And thanks and praises seemed to run
So fast out of his heart, I thought
They never would have done.
– I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning.
Alas! The gratitude of men
Has oftner left me mourning.
(97–104)
Those sonorous concluding lines alter the rhythms of the poem’s opening and at last establish the narrator’s and reader’s realization of Simon Lee’s unique identity and value. The one life we share makes us all responsible for each other – even if the practical ramifications of that sometimes overwhelming obligation are frequently left unstated in Lyrical Ballads.
In ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth changes his verse form, his use of dramatic speakers, and his diction; but in that poem he sums up many of the themes of the collection. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is written in the blank verse used by Milton, and like Paradise Lost the poem is one of belief, albeit a confession of humanistic faith without mention of a god. Setting himself outside the tradition of Christian conversion autobiographies stretching back to the fifth-century St Augustine, Wordsworth turns not to the Deity for his heart’s guardian and his soul’s ‘moral being’ but instead to nature (109–10). For Wordsworth on a walking tour taking in a Christian abbey, now in ruins, this affirmation of faith is personal and rooted in his evolving sense of self as he moved from the ‘coarser pleasures’ of boyhood to more ‘elevated thoughts’ (74, 96). The multiple dramatic speakers of some other Lyrical Ballads poems are gone or rather are replaced by Wordsworth’s dialogue between his present and past personalities as he examines how he has changed, especially in the five years since he last visited Tintern Abbey. His sister Dorothy – not given her own voice in the poem – is suddenly addressed at the end, in part as a representative of William’s former self and also as a subject of tender blessings and an embodiment of future hopes. Finally, the diction, magnificent as it is, does not sound much like the language of ordinary men and women in conversation:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man . . .
(94–100)
Both the suffering and the joy detailed in Lyrical Ballads are acknowledged and fused by Wordsworth as he hears the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ and is ‘A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains’, both suffering humanity and beautiful nature parts of that ‘mighty world’ which we halfcreate and perceive (92, 104–8).
Present-day criticism of ‘Tintern Abbey’ has made the poem controversial. The contentious issue is not particularly to determine what Wordsworth claims in the poem but to judge how much of his past selves, particularly of his past political and revolutionary selves, he has concealed or abandoned to make those affirmations. Similarly, Wordsworth’s account of the walking tour draws on eighteenth-century picturesque landscape traditions, and all but ignores the industrialization and grinding poverty of the neighbourhood. Whether the poem, written as the poet prepared to leave England for Germany, is a confident Wordsworthian re-assertion of why he is still a ‘worshipper of Nature’ (153) or a disingenuous masking of his doubt-riddled withdrawal from political radicalism (or, better, something in between), ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a pivotal work in Wordsworth’s career and in the judgement of his critics.
Lyrical Ballads (1800)
By 4 October 1798, when the first edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in an edition of five hundred copies, with nineteen poems written by Wordsworth and four – including Rime of the Ancient Mariner – by Coleridge, the poets were in Germany hoping to improve their knowledge of German. Coleridge went to the university city of Göttingen, while the less well-funded William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent the winter at Goslar. Separated from Coleridge and isolated by language from the Goslar inhabitants, the Wordsworths weathered the coldest winter of the century in meagre accommodations, trapped in a dreary town with no library. Wordsworth turned inward and backward, writing in blank verse an autobiographical series of adult meditations on childhood episodes. Such passages in unrhymed iambic pentameter eventually contributed to The Prelude; and two, ‘Nutting’ and ‘There was a Boy’, appear in the added second volume of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.
Nearly all his rhymed poems written in that frigid winter of 1798–9 deal with death, particularly the ‘Mathew’ and the ‘Lucy’ poems. Works about ‘Mathew’ draw on one or more of Wordsworth’s Hawkshead schoolmasters, but ‘Lucy’ is harder to trace to a specific source because that name for a dead lover was a commonplace in eighteenth-century literature. Coleridge speculated that Wordsworth may have ‘in some gloomier moment . . . fancied the moment in which his Sister might die’ (STCL i 479). In any case, the modern conception of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy poems’ including ‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways’, ‘Strange fits of passion I have known’, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’, ‘I travell’d among unknown men’, probably composed later, in 1801, and sometimes a few others – owes more to the groupings of such Victorian editors as Matthew Arnold and Francis Palgrave than to Wordsworth himself. Nevertheless, those poems – often considered as a set – are among the poet’s most haunting and widely read works.
In ‘Strange fits of passion I have known’, for example, the narrator recounts his seemingly ordinary horseback journey to Lucy’s cottage. But that journey becomes increasingly mysterious and foreboding. As the moon descends toward the cottage, the speaker’s consciousness gradually merges the moon with Lucy in the trance-like reverie in part produced by the rhythmic galloping of the horse. At the end of the poem, the speaker experiences a moment of pure terror:
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.
My horse mov’d on; hoof after hoof
He rais’d and never stopp’d:
When down behind the cottage roof
At once the planet dropp’d.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover’s head –
‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried,
‘If Lucy should be dead!’
(17–28)
Wordsworth’s later 1815 revision of the penultimate stanza makes even more shocking this precipitous disappearance of the moon, as he emphasizes its sudden drop in three stressed monosyllables: ‘At once the bright Moon dropped.’
An early draft of this poem contains one additional stanza, producing a rather different conclusion:
I told her this; her laughter light
Is ringing in my ears;
And when I think upon that night
My eyes are dim with tears.4
With that extra stanza, we have a poem with less mystery and more of a solution. The additional lines focus on Lucy’s death at some future time, and the stanza ends with the conventional tears of an age of sensibility. Wordsworth’s lopping off the draft conclusion forces the reader to concentrate instead on the operation of the mind: How did the poet come to associate the moon with his lover Lucy? What psychological mechanism triggered the sudden fears of her death? How, in brief, do our minds work? When the two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared, Wordsworth wrote in his famous ‘Preface’ that the principal intent of such seemingly uneventful poems was to trace in them ‘the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement’ (p. 743).
Wordsworth returned to England from Germany in May 1799, bringing with him about half of the poems to be published in the second volume of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. After visiting with their Yorkshire cousins, the Hutchinsons, William and Dorothy Wordsworth found their next home in Grasmere in the Lake District, arriving at Dove Cottage on 20 December 1799. For Wordsworth, the return to the Lakes recovered his childhood haunts, and accounts of ‘homecomings’ and appreciations of his new ‘Home at Grasmere’ (as he titled one long poem then written as part of The Recluse) dominate the poetry of 1800.5
These works written at Grasmere in 1800 differ significantly from some of what is in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Gone are the idiot boys, mad mothers, and despairing convicts of the 1798 volume. Nothing now written at Grasmere sounds remotely like these gothic lines from ‘The Convict’, a poem, in fact, dropped from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads:
While the jail mastiff howls at the dull-clanking chain,
From the roots of his hair there shall start
A thousand sharp punctures of cold-sweating pain,
And terror shall leap at his heart.
(37–40)
Similarly, Wordsworth abandons his psychological studies of disordered minds, as in ‘The Mad Mother’. If Lyrical Ballads (1798) frequently laments ‘what man has made of man’, the poems written in the poet’s first year at Grasmere sound a more hopeful strain. Those poems, no less cognizant of suffering, flow from the philosophical positions Wordsworth arrived at in ‘Tintern Abbey’.
On the 1799 journey ‘home’ to their native Lake District, Wordsworth heard the story he recounts in ‘Hart-leap Well’. That poem, one of the first written at Grasmere and the opening one in the new second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), tells of the tragic death of the hart and the remains of a pleasure-house built to mark the sad spot. On the eve of a new century, however, Wordsworth sounds almost millenarian in his belief in a better earthly world to come:
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For them the quiet creatures whom he loves.
She [Nature] 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.
(165–8, 173–6)
In 1800 at Grasmere Wordsworth hoped that he was indeed on the cusp of ‘the milder day’, better – in some ways – than ‘the bowers / Of blissful Eden’ (Home at Grasmere 123–4) because the Lake District was for him a recovered paradise as he, like the biblical prodigal son, returned home. The Grasmere poems of 1800 mirror the aspirations of William and Dorothy, who found together at Dove Cottage their first adult home that seemed to offer the possibility of permanence.
At the start of work on Wordsworth’s new second volume, Coleridge described what his friend was writing as ‘Lyrical Ballads, and Pastorals’ (STCL i 585). Pastorals, of course, have a long and distinguished history encompassing both Greek and Roman poets, especially the originator of the form, Theocritus, and Virgil, as well as the English writers whom Wordsworth increasingly came to measure himself against – Spenser, Milton, Pope, and others. The genre’s reputation as a training ground for the epic poet may also have appealed to Wordsworth, who since 1798 had thought of his assorted fragments of The Recluse as his epic-in-progress. Wordsworth’s pastorals, however, do not contain the traditional urban poet’s meditations upon simple shepherds and their bucolic life. His stance is rather as a rural man himself, one who, because he belongs to the countryside and it to him, can write truthfully about his surroundings and his neighbours. Like George Crabbe before him (The Village 1783), Wordsworth’s depictions are realistic, but more sympathetically presented than Crabbe’s. Most of these 1800 pastorals retell rural tragedies. Wordsworth’s Lake District is not Shakespeare’s escapist and mostly idyllic Forest of Arden, a contrast that may well have occurred to the poet himself since he refers to As You Like It in a verse introduction, which he did not choose to publish, to ‘Nutting’.6
No poem in Lyrical Ballads (1798) is actually called a ‘pastoral’, and the word itself appears but twice in the volume, both times in the last-written poem, ‘Tintern Abbey’. On the other hand, five titles in Lyrical Ballads (1800) have the word ‘pastoral’ in their subtitles: ‘The Brothers’, ‘The Oak and the Broom’, ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, ‘The Pet Lamb’, and ‘Michael’. Five additional poems record the poet’s ‘Naming of Places’ in his new valley, christening those sacred spots after family and friends to preserve the memory of events that occurred there. In three ‘Inscriptions’, Wordsworth wrote about – and sometimes literally on – the pastoral landscape. Indeed, nearly every poem written at Grasmere in 1800 can be considered some version of pastoral as Wordsworth assimilates his new environment and eventually defines himself as native to it.7
Of the Grasmere poems published in Lyrical Ballads (1800), perhaps the best, ‘Michael, a Pastoral Poem’, concludes the second volume of new works. Like The Ruined Cottage, ‘Michael’ is a framed narrative in which the storyteller guides the reader’s reactions to the distressing tale he tells. The work begins with the narrator’s directions to walk ‘Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill’ to find ‘a straggling Heap of unhewn stones’ (2, 17). In the poem’s last two lines, the speaker again draws our attention to the heapedup stones but now identifies them as an ‘unfinished Sheepfold . . . / Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Gill’ (490–1). Between those paired opening and closing references to stones and stream, we find out not only what the stones are and why they are significant but also how the narrator thinks we should react to the ‘history / Homely and rude’ (34–5) which gives them meaning.
That story, ‘ungarnish’d with events’ (19) as are so many of the stories told in Lyrical Ballads, pushes Wordsworth’s narrative technique to its limit. The climax is in fact a non-event, the moment when we hear that the old shepherd Michael ‘never lifted up a single stone’ (475). The history that precedes this lack of action can be simply told. Michael loves his land and his son Luke with equal intensity. Years before, Michael pledged his land as collateral for a loan to his nephew, and now ‘unforeseen misfortunes’ (223) mean Michael has to pay. After much anguished discussion, Michael and his wife Isabel decide not to sell any of the patrimonial lands but instead to send Luke to the city to earn the money. First, though, Michael takes Luke to a spot where the old man planned to build a sheepfold ‘Near the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill’ (332). Midway through the poem, we thus get another structural repetition of the opening and closing references to a specific landscape. After hearing from his father of his love for him and of the significance of the land, Luke places the cornerstone for the sheepfold as a covenant between Luke, Michael, and the ancestral property. In only six lines, Wordsworth, his focus firmly on Michael’s unspoken feelings and not on Luke’s profligate misadventures, informs us that Luke undertook unspecified ‘evil courses’ in the ‘dissolute city’ and had to flee beyond the seas (451–6). Now the reader, as in ‘Simon Lee’, can appreciate why the smallest of things, such as Michael’s inability to continue work on the sheepfold, have – when properly understood – the most striking import. Such tragic stories best delineate what is permanent in human nature:
There is a comfort in the strength of love;
’Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would break the heart: – old Michael found it so.
(457–9)
Wordsworth’s poems sometimes seem so plainly presented that their artistry escapes notice. Besides the poet’s careful structural design in ‘Michael’, Wordsworth there echoes both the Bible and Virgil’s Georgics, setting his Grasmere shepherd’s tale into a timeless context that nevertheless preserves Michael’s individuality. Most of the poem’s readers would associate its blank verse with Milton; in ‘Michael’, thus, the form itself claims for this unadorned pastoral the importance of Milton’s cosmic epic. The leader of the opposition party in Parliament, Charles James Fox – to whom Wordsworth sent Lyrical Ballads (1800) – in fact wrote back to the poet that he thought blank verse to be unsuited for ordinary subjects treated with simplicity (STCL ii, 676n). Wordsworth’s presentation letter to Fox of 14 January 1801 emphasized that this poetic artistry in ‘Michael’ had a political subtext: the government’s policies were producing ‘a rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society’. ‘Michael’, and ‘The Brothers’, Wordsworth continued, ‘were written with a view to shew that men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’, a theme of most of the poems written in that first year at Grasmere.
About 25 January 1801, Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared in two volumes, the first one reissuing – with revisions – Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the second containing a somewhat uneasy mixture of the Grasmere poems of 1800 with the Goslar ones written in 1798–9. Paramount among those changes made in the first volume of 1800 was Wordsworth’s addition to it of a critical manifesto, a preface providing a lengthy theoretical justification for the works to follow. Wordsworth’s unshakeable faith in his own greatness and originality created the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instruct his readers how to read those poems.
Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
Wordsworth’s lyric voice fell silent for over a year after publication of Lyrical Ballads (1800). By mid-1801, he had received the news that the books were nearly all sold – a welcome sign of his growing reputation – and that a new edition was called for by the publisher. No new poems were added in the edition of 1802 or in the final one of 1805, but Wordsworth in 1802 revised his already printed texts. The second volume now also acquired its own critical essay, the ‘Appendix on Poetic Diction’, and the Preface in the first volume gained a soaring panegyric to the role of the poet: ‘He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love . . . [T]he 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’ (LB 753).
If that grand pronouncement seems to have more of a self-consciously literary flavour than do many of the works in Lyrical Ballads, so do the poems Wordsworth wrote when he returned to composing short pieces in the startlingly creative spring and summer of 1802. He then completed about thirty lyrics; and several other poems – among them ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ – have their roots in 1802. As Wordsworth in 1802 left behind both ballads and pastoral, new styles, forms, and subject matters found expression in the poems that dominate Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).
There is some carry-over from his earlier work, to be sure. The first poems written after his return to short compositions in March 1802 are similar to what is in Lyrical Ballads, and in some cases they may have been thought of as possible supplements to the edition of 1802. Such works – among them ‘The Affliction of Mary — of — ’, ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, and ‘Alice Fell’ – reprise Wordsworth’s psychologically complex dramatic monologues or framed narratives, again presenting speaker’s tales and interlocutor’s meditations to lead the reader to an imaginative confrontation with pain and loss. Verse forms of these poems vary, but the ballad stanza is usually somewhere in the background. But as the spring of 1802 progressed, many of Wordsworth’s poems became more joyful, more personal, more playful, more rooted in his own and Dorothy’s memories, and more varied in their lyric forms:
Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
The time, when in our childish plays
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chaced the Butterfly!
(‘To a Butterfly’ [‘Stay near me’] 10–13)
One influence on Wordsworth’s new style in poetry was his reading of older English writers, particularly Chaucer, some of whom he translated in December 1801, and such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets as Spenser, Jonson, Cowley, Herbert, and Herrick. What Wordsworth drew from these writers was not, usually, specific subjects and images but rather a more light-hearted, polished, metrically proficient, graceful style. According to Jared Curtis, one of the most acute critics of this poetry of 1802, there is within it ‘a gradual movement . . . from the bare elements of meter and concrete image to a chaste deployment of metaphor and symbol’.8 Wordsworth was always a careful craftsman, but in 1802 his poems became artful in a fresh way.
A comparable move to the more traditionally ‘literary’ occurs in metrical and stanzaic forms, some of which are drawn from the poets Wordsworth was now reading. This process continues, and accelerates, what had already happened in Wordsworth’s writing from 1798 to 1800, a move from experimenting with the ballad form – because of its folk origins frequently seen as having more of the direct and simple virtues of the less literate than showing the hand of the poetic artificer – to the pastoral, a classically rooted and highly literary form in which incipient epic poets could learn their craft. Similarly, the apparently artless conversational blank verse of many poems in Lyrical Ballads occurs nowhere in Poems, in Two Volumes. No poem in Lyrical Ballads is entitled an ode, that elevated and elaborate classical form; two odes appear in the 1807 volumes, including the impressive final poem there titled simply ‘Ode’ but later expanded to ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.
Still another conventional literary form now also resurfaced. Wordsworth, after Dorothy read Milton’s sonnets to him on 21 May 1802, had an experience analogous to Keats’ in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Wordsworth had known Milton’s sonnets for many years but ‘was particularly struck on that occasion with the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most of them’. That same day in May, Wordsworth, fascinated by rediscovering a form, ‘took fire’ and wrote three sonnets, his first composition of that kind he recalled since he was a schoolboy.9 Wordsworth’s excitement with this demanding form continued. While there are no sonnets in Lyrical Ballads, fifty-six appear in Poems, in Two Volumes, the first explaining that ‘’twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’ (‘Nuns fret not’, 10–11). Some of these sonnets are miscellaneous in character, ones in which Wordsworth describes his personal reflections and his travels, as in ‘The World is too much with us’ and in the comparatively rare – for him – celebration of urban splendors in ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ (‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’). In other sonnets (see, for example, ‘London, 1802’: ‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour’), Wordsworth honours his great predecessor by likewise employing the form for explicitly political purposes. In particular, William and Dorothy’s trip to Calais in August 1802 prompted such rousing protests against tyranny and oppression as ‘I griev’d for Buonaparte’, ‘Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’, and ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’.
As for the lyrics composed in 1802, they frequently focused on specific and common things: butterfly, cuckoo, rainbow, glow-worm, robin, celandine, sparrow’s nest, green linnet, daisy, skylark. Here, and in many similar poems later written for Poems, in Two Volumes, the poet joyfully and light-heartedly records his play of emotions over these objects of the natural world. These poems, less discussed by critics today than are the experimental pieces in Lyrical Ballads or such longer works as The Prelude and the assorted fragments of The Recluse, were reprinted in countless anthologies and cemented Wordsworth’s reputation – for good and for ill – among his contemporaries.
An ubiquitous springtime flower forms the subject of what is probably Wordsworth’s most well-known work: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, sometimes referred to as ‘The Daffodils’, even by the poet himself. Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal for 15 April 1802 records the scene before brother and sister on their walk at Ullswater:
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.10
Unlike Dorothy’s journal entry with its dazzling run-on sentence that breathlessly conveys the immediate sensation, William waited two years to write about those Ullswater daffodils, characteristically finding in his memories continuing renewal for future times. Equally distinctive of Wordsworth, unfortunately, is his elimination of Dorothy from the experience – and his appropriation of some of her language – as he concentrates solely on his own moods.
‘The Daffodils’ opens with the speaker remote from the natural world, as is a cloud that soars distantly above that world. Abruptly, a ‘laughing company’ of daffodils surrounds him. The sparkling waves of Ullswater, the daffodils ‘dancing in the breeze’, the surrounding trees, and even that floating cloud all fuse in a vision of unity that encompasses the poet himself. But the ultimate import of that visionary moment becomes apparent to him only years later:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure feels,
And dances with the Daffodils.
(13–18)
The poem is thus a miniature Prelude, showing the congruence between Wordsworth’s short lyrics and the mammoth blank verse poem that he was simultaneously composing. Like The Prelude, the lyrics of 1802 and a few years afterwards chronicle renovating ‘spots of time’, but in these shorter poems frequently drawing less from childhood memories than from the Grasmere poet’s mature experiences. Whether those memories be in the distant or the proximate past, they bind all our days – gone, present, and to come – ‘each to each by natural piety’ (‘My heart leaps up’, 9).
Poems, in Two Volumes, published on 8 May 1807, was Wordsworth’s first collection of short poems to be entirely his own, since the four editions of Lyrical Ballads all included a few works by Coleridge. In 1807, Wordsworth carefully arranged his 115 new poems into various sections, trying to provide – sometimes successfully and sometimes not – a context in which small poems could be seen by subject, by mood, or by genre as parts of a larger conception. One such classification included pieces written during William and Dorothy’s tour of Scotland in 1803; another grouping posited an imaginary ‘Tour, Chiefly on Foot’ in which the poet met such characters as beggars, Alice Fell, and the old leech gatherer. Sonnets had their own section, in the first part ‘Miscellaneous’ ones and in the second part poems ‘Dedicated to Liberty’. ‘Moods of My Own Mind’ and two other heterogeneous sections cohere less obviously. In the first two of the volumes’ final three poems, Wordsworth presents personal meditations on death. ‘Lines Composed at Grasmere’ and ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ each end with the word ‘mourn’ but express hope – explicitly religious in ‘Lines’ – as the poet memorializes first the statesman Charles James Fox to whom he had sent Lyrical Ballads and then John Wordsworth, who had lived with his siblings William and Dorothy at Grasmere for nine months in 1800. The final poem in 1807 and in subsequent lifetime collected editions of Wordsworth’s works, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, presents a much more stately reflection on loss and hoped-for renewal, this time of the visionary imagination. As the poet approached his fifth decade, he placed last in Poems, in Two Volumes this formal ode weighing the disadvantages and advantages of growing up and growing older.
Within a fortnight of the publication of Poems, in Two Volumes, Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807, telling her that he expected the reviews to be unfavourable. There were those, he predicted, who might consider the subject matter of some of his new poems to be ‘very trifling’. Wordsworth launched his own pre-emptive attack against such possible criticism, rhetorically asking Lady Beaumont whether the poems grouped as ‘Moods of My own Mind’ do not ‘taken collectively, fix the attention upon a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the predominance of certain affections more or less permanent, more or less capable of salutary renewal in the mind of the being contemplating these objects?’ Given the confessional poetry of our own time, we are unsurprised at these personal – sometimes private – and emotionally intense ‘Moods of My own Mind’, taking their origin from the most commonplace of events and objects. But Wordsworth correctly anticipated criticism of this category of poems, even though it is clear he did not anticipate the firestorm of scathing ridicule.
The reviews are remarkably similar, even down to some of the descriptive adjectives criticizing Wordsworth’s most personal poems: ‘flimsy, puerile thoughts, expressed in such feeble halting verse we have seldom seen’, ‘namby-pamby’ (British Critic); ‘puerile beyond the power of imitation’ (Le Beau Monde); ‘nauseous and nauseating sensibilities to weeds and insects’, ‘false taste and puerile conceit’ (Critical Review); ‘a very paragon of silliness and affectation’, ‘an insult on the public taste’, ‘namby-pamby’ (Edinburgh Review); ‘calculated to excite disgust and anger in a lover of poetry’ (Poetical Register).11 The main problem, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review, was Wordsworth’s use of subjects that the ‘greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting’. The reviewer in The Satirist wondered how anyone could think it worthwhile to write about his memories of some daffodils blowing about in the wind; similarly, the writer for the Annual Review excoriated Wordsworth’s attaching of ‘exquisite emotions’ to objects in which no one else had the slightest interest. The poet, thundered Francis Jeffrey, had openly violated ‘the established laws of poetry’. Clearly, the taste by which the critics could appreciate Poems, in Two Volumes was still in the future. In 1807, Wordsworth suffered ‘the most humiliating martyrdom in his reputation as a poet’ (The Satirist). Lyrical Ballads went through four editions in seven years, but after the same time span a quarter of the sole printing of Poems, in Two Volumes remained unsold. When Wordsworth finally did bring himself to publish another work in 1814, he did not give the reviewers any opportunity to complain about small and trivial poems: The Excursion, huge in itself, was announced as just a portion of The Recluse.
Wordsworth’s life in 1807 had not yet reached its midpoint, but that year marks the last time he chose to publish an independent collection of his new and miscellaneous short poems. Henceforth, beginning with his volumes of 1815, he folded new poems into his collected editions. The poet – certainly wounded by the reviewers in 1807 – now put his faith in those with improved standards of literary taste, readers whom he hoped to educate by his poetry and critical prose: ‘Every Author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ (‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, 1815).12 Even though Wordsworth continued after 1807 to write short poems and to write them well, Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes thus stake his claim to be a major lyric poet. Before the conclusion of the nineteenth century whose literature Wordsworth eventually so dominated, both Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes appeared in scholarly editions. And in our own time, astonishingly for two old collections of poetry, multiple editions of these works remain in print, preserving all the short poems – and the poet’s original arrangement of them – which at last form the basis for much of Wordsworth’s reputation.
NOTES
1 STCL i 489n; The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1973), ii, 125.
2 All quotations from Wordsworth’s poems, ‘Fenwick Notes,’ and critical prose in Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes are from the Cornell Wordsworth Series editions: Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Poems, in Two Volumes, and other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
3 William Greswell, ‘Wordsworth’s Quantock Poems’, Temple Bar, 107 (January – April 1896), 536.
4 A complete text of this early version – titled in manuscript ‘Once, when my love was strong and gay’ – appears in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 293–4.
5 For a fuller discussion of these Grasmere poems of 1799–1800, see my ‘Tourist or Native Son: Wordsworth’s Homecomings of 1799–1800’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51 (1996), 1–15.
6 This introduction to ‘Nutting’ from Dove Cottage Manuscript 16 is published in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 305–7.
7 Stephen Parrish provides an excellent discussion of these pastorals in The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 149–87.
8 Wordsworth’s Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 62–3.
9 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p. 19.
10 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 85.
11 These reviews are conveniently collected in The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers: Part A – The Lake Poets, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York and London: Garland, 1972).
12 Prose iii 80.