1. The poem, written in April 1801, was first published without a title in Poems in Two Volumes (1807).

2. Wordsworth is probably recalling his visit to Germany, 1798–9.

3. The five so-called ‘Lucy Poems’ were written between 1798 and 1801, and all except ‘I travelled among unknown men’ were written in Germany and published during 1800 in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Although many modern anthologies publish them as a sequence, Wordsworth did not plan them as a group. The identity of Lucy remains a mystery: some scholars cite his sister Dorothy, but she is almost certainly a construct, enabling the poet to express his homesickness for England.

1. Ives’s subtitle is ‘So may it be!’ Wordsworth’s poem, written on 26 March 1802, was published in 1807.

1. Frederick Kelly (1881–1916) was an Australian composer who published a mere eight songs during his lifetime from an extant total of about twenty.

2. Wordsworth took as his source his sister Dorothy’s prose description in her Grasmere Journal, written on 15 April 1802: ‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones, about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as upon 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.’ Wordsworth’s poem dates from 1804.

1. Wordsworth refers in The Prelude to two trees that had deep significance for him in his youth: the ‘tall ash’ opposite his bedroom window at Hawkshead and the ‘single tree’ in the college groves at Cambridge.

1. This passage from The Prelude (Book X, lines 63–77) suggests that Wordsworth arrived in Paris on 29 October, the day on which Louvet accused Robespierre of having ‘perverted the Jacobin Club and exercised a despotism of opinion’. ‘These bloody men’, he said, ‘wished to satiate their cruel eyes with the spectacle of 28,000 bodies sacrificed to their fury. I accuse you of having dispersed and persecuted the Legislative Assembly, of having aimed at supreme power; and in this accusation your own conduct will speak more strongly than words.’ (Report in Morning Chronicle, 3–6 Nov.)

2. On 25 July 1792, the Duke of Brunswick signed a manifesto to the effect that the Allies would avenge any violence done to the King, by taking military action in Paris. The manifesto, which was designed to terrorize Paris, merely strengthened the hands of the more violent citizens: Danton decided to depose the King and hold him as hostage. The Tuileries was stormed by the mob on 9 August, and the King imprisoned on 10 August ‘for his own security’. Just over a week later, on 19 August, the Allied forces entered France and took Longwy (24 August) and Verdun (1 September). In retaliation the committee of the Commune, led by Marat, Danton and Robespierre, organized the September Massacres (2, 3 and 4 September), during which 3,000 Royalist suspects were dragged from prison and slaughtered.

3. Cf. As You Like It, Act I, sc. i, 13: ‘His horses are bred better: … they are taught their mannage.’

4. Cf. Macbeth, Act II, sc. ii, 35.

1. A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table was commissioned for the 1962 City of London Music Festival. The six poems, chosen by Christopher Hassall, depict various scenes and aspects of London. The work was first performed by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Gerald Moore in July of that year.

2. Collins’s ‘Ode on the death of Thomson’ was the last poem that he published.

1. Corp’s cycle comprises songs to poems on London by William Dunbar, Lord Byron, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Henry Carey.