Whom I already loved;�not verily


25 For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills


Where was their occupation and abode.


And hence this Tale, while I was yet a Boy


Careless of books, yet having felt the power


Of Nature, by the gentle agency


30 Of natural objects, led me on to feel


For passions that were not my own, and think


(At random and imperfectly indeed)


On man, the heart of man, and human life.


Therefore, although it be a history


35 Homely and rude, I will relate the same


For the delight of a few natural hearts;


1. This poem is founded on the actual misfortunes lar vein on how a "little tract of land" could serve, of a family at Grasmere. For the account of the for the class of men whom he had represented in


sheepfold, see Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere "Michael," as "a kind of permanent rallying point


Journals, October 11, 1800 (p. 393). Wordsworth for their domestic feelings"; he also remarked,


wrote to Thomas Poole, on April 9, 1801, that he with regret, that this class, "small independent pro-


had attempted to picture a man "agitated by two prietors of land," was "rapidly disappearing." The


of the most powerful affections of the human subtitle shows Wordsworth's shift of the term "pas


heart; the parental affection, and the love of prop-toral" from aristocratic make-believe to the tragic


erty, landed property, including the feelings of suffering of people in what he called "humble and


inheritance, home, and personal and family inde-rustic life."


pendence." In another letter, sent, along with a 2. A ravine forming the bed of a stream. Green-


copy of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, January 14, 1801, head Ghyll is not far from Wordsworth's cottage at


to Charles James Fox, the leader of the opposition Grasmere. The other places named in the poem are


in Parliament, Wordsworth commented in a simi-also in that vicinity.


.


MICHAEL / 293


And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake


Of youthful Poets, who among these hills


Will be my second self when I am gone.


40 Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale


There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name;


An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.


His bodily frame had been from youth to age


Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,


45 Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,


And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt


And watchful more than ordinary men.


Hence had he learned the meaning of all winds,


Of blasts of every tone; and, oftentimes,


50 When others heeded not, he heard the South0 south wind Make subterraneous music, like the noise


Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.


The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock


Bethought him, and he to himself would say,


55 "The winds are now devising work for me!"


And, truly, at all times, the storm, that drives


The traveller to a shelter, summoned him


Up to the mountains: he had been alone


Amid the heart of many thousand mists,


60 That came to him, and left him, on the heights.


So lived he till his eightieth year was past.


And grossly that man errs, who should suppose


That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,


Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.


65 Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed


The common air; hills, which with vigorous step


He had so often climbed; which had impressed


So many incidents upon his mind


Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;


70 Which, like a book, preserved the memory


Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,


Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts


The certainty of honourable gain; Those fields, those hills�what could they less? had laid


75 Strong hold on his affections, were to him


A pleasurable feeling of blind love,


The pleasure which there is in life itself.


His days had not been passed in singleness.


His Helpmate was a comely matron, old�


so Though younger than himself full twenty years.


She was a woman of a stirring life,


Whose heart was in her house: two wheels she had


Of antique form; this large, for spinning wool;


That small, for flax; and if one wheel had rest,


85 It was because the other was at work. The Pair had but one inmate in their house,


An only Child, who had been born to them


.


294 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


When Michael, telling0 o'er his years, began countingTo deem that he was old,�in shepherd's phrase,


90 With one foot in the grave. This only Son, With two brave sheep-dogs tried0 in many a storm, tested The one of an inestimable worth,


Made all their household. I may truly say,


That they were as a proverb in the vale


95 For endless industry. When day was gone,


And from their occupations out of doors


The Son and Father were come home, even then,


Their labour did not cease; unless when all


Turned to the cleanly supper-board, and there,


IOO Each with a mess of pottage and skimmed milk,


Sat round the basket piled with oaten cakes,


And their plain home-made cheese. Yet when the meal


Was ended, Luke (for so the Son was named)


And his old Father both betook themselves


105 To such convenient work as might employ


Their hands by the fire-side; perhaps to card


Wool for the Housewife's spindle, or repair


Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe,


Or other implement of house or field.


no Down from the ceiling, by the chimney's edge,


That in our ancient uncouth country style


With huge and black projection overbrowed


Large space beneath, as duly as the light


Of day grew dim the Housewife hung a lamp;


us An aged utensil, which had performed


Service beyond all others of its kind.


Early at evening did it burn�and late,


Surviving comrade of uncounted hours,


Which, going by from year to year, had found,


120 And left the couple neither gay perhaps Nor cheerful, yet with objects and with hopes,


Living a life of eager industry.


And now, when Luke had reached his eighteenth year,


There by the light of his old lamp they sate,


125 Father and Son, while far into the night


The Housewife plied her own peculiar work,


Making the cottage through the silent hours


Murmur as with the sound of summer flies.


This light was famous in its neighbourhood,


130 And was a public symbol of the life That thrifty Pair had lived. For, as it chanced,


Their cottage on a plot of rising ground


Stood single, with large prospect, north and south,


High into Easedale, up to Dunmail-Raise,


135 And westward to the village near the lake;


And from this constant light, so regular


And so far seen, the House itself, by all


Who dwelt within the limits of the vale, Both old and young, was named THE


EVENING STAR.


.


MICHAEL / 295


140


Thus living on through such a length of years,


The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs


Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart


This son of his old age was yet more dear�


Less from instinctive tenderness, the same


145 Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all�


Than that a child, more than all other gifts


That earth can offer to declining man,


Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts,


And stirrings of inquietude, when they


150 By tendency of nature needs must fail.


Exceeding was the love he bare to him,


His heart and his heart's joy! For oftentimes


Old Michael, while he was a babe in arms,


Had done him female service, not alone


155 For pastime and delight, as is the use


Of fathers, but with patient mind enforced


To acts of tenderness; and he had rocked


Flis cradle, as with a woman's gentle hand.


And, in a later time, ere yet the Boy


160 Had put on boy's attire, did Michael love,


Albeit of a stern unbending mind,


To have the Young-one in his sight, when he


Wrought in the field, or on his shepherd's stool


Sate with a fettered sheep before him stretched


165 Under the large old oak, that near his door


Stood single, and, from matchless depth of shade,


Chosen for the Shearer's covert from the sun,


Thence in our rustic dialect was called


The CLIPPING TREE, a name which yet it bears.


170 There, while they two were sitting in the shade,


With others round them, earnest all and blithe,


Would Michael exercise his heart with looks


Of fond correction and reproof bestowed


Upon the Child, if he disturbed the sheep


175 By catching at their legs, or with his shouts


Scared them, while they lay still beneath the shears.


And when by Heaven's good grace the boy grew up


A healthy Lad, and carried in his cheek


Two steady roses that were five years old;


180 Then Michael from a winter coppice3 cut


With his own hand a sapling, which he hooped


With iron, making it throughout in all


Due requisites a perfect shepherd's staff,


And gave it to the Boy; wherewith equipt


185 He as a watchman oftentimes was placed


At gate or gap, to stem or turn the flock;


And, to his office prematurely called,


There stood the urchin, as you will divine,


3. Grove of small trees.


.


296 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Something between a hindrance and a help;


190 And for this cause not always, I believe, Receiving from his Father hire0 of praise; wagesThough nought was left undone which staff, or voice,


Or looks, or threatening gestures, could perform. But soon as Luke, full ten years old, could stand


195 Against the mountain blasts; and to the heights,


Not fearing toil, nor length of weary ways,


He with his Father daily went, and they


Were as companions, why should I relate


That objects which the Shepherd loved before


200 Were dearer now? that from the Boy there came


Feelings and emanations�things which were


Light to the sun and music to the wind;


And that the old Man's heart seemed born again? Thus in his Father's sight the Boy grew up:


205 And now, when he had reached his eighteenth year,


He was his comfort and his daily hope. While in this sort the simple household lived


From day to day, to Michael's ear there came


Distressful tidings. Long before the time


210 Of which I speak, the Shepherd had been bound


In surety for his brother's son, a man


Of an industrious life, and ample means;


But unforeseen misfortunes suddenly


Had prest upon him; and old Michael now


215 Was summoned to discharge the forfeiture,


A grievous penalty, but little less


Than half his substance.4 This unlooked-for claim,


At the first hearing, for a moment took


More hope out of his life than he supposed


220 That any old man ever could have lost. As soon as he had armed himself with strength


To look his trouble in the face, it seemed


The Shepherd's sole resource to sell at once


A portion of his patrimonial fields.


225 Such was his first resolve; he thought again,


And his heart failed him. "Isabel," said he,


Two evenings after he had heard the news,


"I have been toiling more than seventy years,


And in the open sunshine of God's love


230 Have we all lived; yet if these fields of ours


Should pass into a stranger's hand, I think


That I could not lie quiet in my grave.


Our lot is a hard lot; the sun himself


Has scarcely been more diligent than I;


235 And I have lived to be a fool at last


4. Michael has guaranteed a loan for his nephew and now has lost the collateral, which amounts to half his financial worth.


.


MICHAEL / 297


To my own family. An evil man


That was, and made an evil choice, if he


Were false to us; and if he were not false,


There are ten thousand to whom loss like this


240 Had been no sorrow. I forgive him;�but


'Twere better to be dumb than to talk thus. "When I began, my purpose was to speak


Of remedies and of a cheerful hope.


Our Luke shall leave us, Isabel; the land


245 Shall not go from us, and it shall be free;� unmortgaged


He shall possess it, free as is the wind


That passes over it. We have, thou know'st,


Another kinsman�he will be our friend


In this distress. He is a prosperous man,


250 Thriving in trade�and Luke to him shall go,


And with his kinsman's help and his own thrift


He quickly will repair this loss, and then


He may return to us. If here he stay,


What can be done? Where every one is poor,


What can be gained?"


255 At this the old Man paused, And Isabel sat silent, for her mind


Was busy, looking back into past times.


There's Richard Bateman,5 thought she to herself,


He was a parish-boy6�at the church-door


260 They made a gathering for him, shillings, pence


And halfpennies, wherewith the neighbours bought


A basket, which they filled with pedlar's wares;


And, with this basket on his arm, the lad


Went up to London, found a master there,


265 Who, out of many, chose the trusty boy


To go and overlook his merchandise


Beyond the seas; where he grew wondrous rich,


And left estates and monies to the poor,


And, at his birth-place, built a chapel floored


270 With marble, which he sent from foreign lands.


These thoughts, and many others of like sort,


Passed quickly through the mind of Isabel,


And her face brightened. The old Man was glad,


And thus resumed:�"Well, Isabel! this scheme


275 These two days, has been meat and drink to me.


Far more than we have lost is left us yet.


�We have enough�I wish indeed that I


Were younger;�but this hope is a good hope.


Make ready Luke's best garments, of the best


280 Buy for him more, and let us send him forth


To-morrow, or the next day, or to-night:


�If he could go, the Boy should go to-night."


5. The story alluded to here is well known in the 6. A poor boy supported financially by the poor country. The chapel is called Ings Chapel and is rates (taxes) paid out by the wealthier members of


on the road leading from Kendal to Ambleside his parish.


[Wordsworth's note, 1802-05].


.


298 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Here Michael ceased, and to the fields went forth


With a light heart. The Housewife for five days


285 Was restless morn and night, and all day long


Wrought on with her best fingers to prepare


Things needful for the journey of her son.


But Isabel was glad when Sunday came


To stop her in her work: for, when she lay


290 By Michael's side, she through the last two nights


Heard him, how he was troubled in his sleep:


And when they rose at morning she could see


That all his hopes were gone. That day at noon


She said to Luke, while they two by themselves


295 Were sitting at the door, "Thou must not go:


We have no other Child but thee to lose,


None to remember�do not go away,


For if thou leave thy Father he will die."


The Youth made answer with a jocund voice;


300 And Isabel, when she had told her fears, Recovered heart. That evening her best fare


Did she bring forth, and all together sat


Like happy people round a Christmas fire. With daylight Isabel resumed her work;


And all the ensuing week the house appeared


As cheerful as a grove in Spring: at length


The expected letter from their kinsman came,


With kind assurances that he would do


His utmost for the welfare of the Boy;


310 To which, requests were added, that forthwith


He might be sent to him. Ten times or more


The letter was read over; Isabel


Went forth to show it to the neighbours round;


Nor was there at that time on English land


315 A prouder heart than Luke's. When Isabel


Had to her house returned, the old Man said,


"He shall depart to-morrow." To this word


The Housewife answered, talking much of things


Which, if at such short notice he should go,


Would surely be forgotten. But at length


She gave consent, and Michael was at ease. Near the tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll,


In that deep valley, Michael had designed


To build a Sheep-fold;7 and, before he heard


325 The tidings of his melancholy loss,


For this same purpose he had gathered up


A heap of stones, which by the streamlet's edge


Lay thrown together, ready for the work.


With Luke that evening thitherward he walked:


330 /And soon as they had reached the place he stopped,


And thus the old Man spake to him:�"My Son,


7. A sheepfold [pen for sheep] in these mountains is an unroofed building of stone walls, with different divisions [Wordsworth's note, 1802�05].


.


MICHAEL / 299


To-morrow thou wilt leave me: with full heart


I look upon thee, for thou art the same


That wert a promise to me ere thy birth,


335 And all thy life hast been my daily joy.


I will relate to thee some little part


Of our two histories; 'twill do thee good


When thou art from me, even if I should touch


On things thou canst not know of. After thou 340 First cam'st into the world�as oft befals


To new-born infants�thou didst sleep away


Two days, and blessings from thy Father's tongue


Then fell upon thee. Day by day passed on,


And still I loved thee with increasing love. 345 Never to living ear came sweeter sounds


Than when I heard thee by our own fire-side


First uttering, without words, a natural tune;


While thou, a feeding babe, didst in thy joy


Sing at thy Mother's breast. Month followed month, 350 And in the open fields my life was passed


And on the mountains; else I think that thou


Hadst been brought up upon thy Father's knees.


But we were playmates, Luke: among these hills,


As well thou knowest, in us the old and young


355 Have played together, nor with me didst thou


Lack any pleasure which a boy can know."


Luke had a manly heart; but at these words


He sobbed aloud. The old Man grasped his hand,


And said, "Nay, do not take it so�I see


360 That these are things of which I need not speak.


�Even to the utmost I have been to thee


A kind and a good Father: and herein


I but repay a gift which I myself


Received at others' hands; for, though now old 365 Beyond the common life of man, I still


Remember them who loved me in my youth.


Both of them sleep together: here they lived,


As all their Forefathers had done; and when


At length their time was come, they were not loth 370 To give their bodies to the family mould.0 grave plot


I wished that thou should'st live the life they lived:


But, 'tis a long time to look back, my Son,


And see so little gain from threescore years.


These fields were burthened0 when they came to me; mortgaged375 Till I was forty years of age, not more


Than half of my inheritance was mine.


I toiled and toiled; God blessed me in my work,


And till these three weeks past the land was free.


�It looks as if it never could endure


38o Another Master. Heaven forgive me, Luke,


If I judge ill for thee, but it seems good


That thou should'st go."


At this the old Man paused;


Then, pointing to the stones near which they stood,


Thus, after a short silence, he resumed:


.


300 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


385 "This was a work for us; and now, my Son,


It is a work for me. But, lay one stone�


Here, lay it for me, Luke, with thine own hands.


Nay, Boy, be of good hope;�we both may live


To see a better day. At eighty-four


390 I still am strong and hale;�do thou thy part;


I will do mine.�I will begin again


With many tasks that were resigned to thee:


Up to the heights, and in among the storms,


Will I without thee go again, and do


395 All works which I was wont to do alone,


Before I knew thy face.�Heaven bless thee, Boy!


Thy heart these two weeks has been beating fast


With many hopes; it should be so�yes�yes�


I knew that thou could'st never have a wish


400 To leave me, Luke: thou hast been bound to me


Only by links of love: when thou art gone,


What will be left to us!�But, I forget


My purposes. Lay now the corner-stone,


As I requested; and hereafter, Luke,


405 When thou art gone away, should evil men


Be thy companions, think of me, my Son,


And of this moment; hither turn thy thoughts,


And God will strengthen thee: amid all fear


And all temptation, Luke, I pray that thou


410 May'st bear in mind the life thy Fathers lived,


Who, being innocent, did for that cause


Bestir them in good deeds. Now, fare thee well�


When thou return'st, thou in this place wilt see


A work which is not here: a covenant


415 'Twill be between us; but, whatever fate


Befal thee, I shall love thee to the last,


And bear thy memory with me to the grave." The Shepherd ended here; and Luke stooped down,


And, as his Father had requested, laid


420 The first stone of the Sheep-fold. At the sight


The old Man's grief broke from him; to his heart


He pressed his Son, he kissed him and wept;


And to the house together they returned.


��Hushed was that House in peace, or seeming peace,


425 Ere the night fell:�with morrow's dawn the Boy


Began his journey, and when he had reached


The public way, he put on a bold face;


And all the neighbours, as he passed their doors,


Came forth with wishes and with farewell prayers,


430 That followed him till he was out of sight. A good report did from their Kinsman come,


Of Luke and his well-doing: and the Boy


Wrote loving letters, full of wondrous news,


Which, as the Housewife phrased it, were throughout


435 "The prettiest letters that were ever seen."


.


MICHAEL / 301


Both parents read them with rejoicing hearts.


So, many months passed on: and once again


The Shepherd went about his daily work


With confident and cheerful thoughts; and now


440 Sometimes when he could find a leisure hour


He to that valley took his way, and there


Wrought at the Sheep-fold. Meantime Luke began


To slacken in his duty; and, at length,


He in the dissolute city gave himself


445 To evil courses: ignominy and shame


Fell on him, so that he was driven at last


To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas.


There is a comfort in the strength of love;


'Twill make a thing endurable, which else


450 Would overset the brain, or break the heart:


I have conversed with more than one who well


Remember the old Man, and what he was


Years after he had heard this heavy news.


His bodily frame had been from youth to age


455 Of an unusual strength. Among the rocks


He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud,


And listened to the wind; and, as before


Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep,


And for the land, his small inheritance.


460 And to that hollow dell from time to time


Did he repair, to build the Fold of which


His flock had need. 'Tis not forgotten yet


The pity which was then in every heart


For the old Man�and 'tis believed by all


465 That many and many a day he thither went,


And never lifted up a single stone.


There, by the Sheep-fold, sometimes was he seen


Sitting alone, or with his faithful Dog,


Then old, beside him, lying at his feet.


470 The length of full seven years, from time to time,


He at the building of this Sheep-fold wrought,


And left the work unfinished when he died.


Three years, or little more, did Isabel


Survive her Husband: at her death the estate


475 Was sold, and went into a stranger's hand.


The Cottage which was named the EVENING STAR


Is gone�the ploughshare has been through the ground


On which it stood;8 great changes have been wrought


In all the neighbourhood:�yet the oak is left


480 That grew beside their door; and the remains


Of the unfinished Sheep-fold may be seen


Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyll.


Oct. 11-Dec. 9, 1800


8. The land on which Michael's sheep had grazed has been turned over to cultivation.


.


302 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Resolution and Independence1


There was a roaring in the wind all night;


The rain came heavily and fell in floods;


But now the sun is rising calm and bright;


The birds are singing in the distant woods;


5 Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;


The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;


And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.


2


All things that love the sun are out of doors;


The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;


io The grass is bright with rain-drops;�on the moors


The hare is running races in her mirth;


And with her feet she from the plashy earth


Raises a mist; that, glittering in the sun,


Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. 3


15 I was a Traveller then upon the moor;


I saw the hare that raced about with joy;


I heard the woods and distant waters roar;


Or heard them not, as happy as a boy:


The pleasant season did my heart employ:


20 My old remembrances went from me wholly; And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.


4


But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might


Of joy in minds that can no further go,


As high as we have mounted in delight


25 In our dejection do we sink as low;


To me that morning did it happen so;


And fears and fancies thick upon me came;


Dim sadness�and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name. 5


I heard the sky-lark warbling in the sky;


so And I bethought me of the playful hare:


Even such a happy Child of earth am I;


Even as these blissful creatures do I fare;


Far from the world I walk, and from all care;


But there may come another day to me�


35 Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty.


1. For the meeting with the old leech gatherer, see the foot of Ullswater, towards Askam. The image Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, October of the hare I then observed on the ridge of the


3, 1800 (p. 393). Wordsworth himself tells us, in Fell." He wrote the poem eighteen months after


a note of 1843, that "I was in the state of feeling this event (see Grasmere Journals, May 4 and 7,


described in the beginning of the poem, while 1802; pp. 398 and 400).


crossing over Barton Fell from Mr. Clarkson's, at


.


RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE / 303


6


My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,


As if life's business were a summer mood;


As if all needful things would come unsought To genial0 faith, still rich in genial good; creative


40 But how can He expect that others should


Build for him, sow for him, and at his call


Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? 7


I thought of Chatterton,2 the marvellous Boy,


The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;


45 Of Him3 who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side:


By our own spirits are we deified:


We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;


But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.


8


50 Now, whether it were by peculiar grace,


A leading from above, a something given,


Yet it befel, that, in this lonely place,


When I with these untoward thoughts had striven,


Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven


55 I saw a Man before me unawares: The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.


9


As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie


Couched on the bald top of an eminence;


Wonder to all who do the same espy,


60 By what means it could thither come, and whence;


So that it seems a thing endued with sense:


Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf


Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;


10


Such seemed this Man,4 not all alive nor dead,


65 Nor all asleep�in his extreme old age:


His body was bent double, feet and head


Coming together in life's pilgrimage;


2. After his early death through drug overdose, a Keats participated. death believed by many to have been a suicide, the 3. Robert Burns, here considered, as Chatterton


poet Thomas Chatterton (1752�1770) became a is, a natural poet who died young and poor, without


prime symbol of neglected boy genius for the adequate recognition, and who seemed to have


Romantics. He came to public attention in his hastened his death through dissipation.


hometown of Bristol in the West of England as the 4. In Wordsworth's analysis of this passage he says


discoverer of the long-lost manuscripts of a local that the stone is endowed with something of life,


15th-century monk named "Thomas Rowley." the sea beast is stripped of some of its life to assim


Rowley's works�in fact Chatterton's own inven-ilate it to the stone, and the old man divested of


tions�included many poems. His pseudo-enough life and motion to make "the two objects


Chaucerian "An Excelente Balade of Charitie" unite and coalesce in just comparison." He used


used the rhyme royal stanza form that Wordsworth the passage to demonstrate his theory of how the


employs here. Reports of the frustrations that "conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying


Chatterton experienced in his attempts to interest powers of the Imagination . . . are all brought into


the London literary establishment in such "discov-conjunction" (Preface to the Poems of 1815). Cf.


eries" provided the seed for that Romantic myth-Coleridge's brief definitions of the imagination in


making in which Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Biographia Literaria, chap. 13 (p. 477).


.


304 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage


Of sickness felt by him in times long past,


70 A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.


11


Himself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face,


Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood:


And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,


Upon the margin of that moorish flood


75 Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,


That heareth not the loud winds when they call;


And moveth all together, if it move at all.


12


At length, himself unsettling, he the pond


Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look


so Upon the muddy water, which he conned,0 studied


As if he had been reading in a book:


And now a stranger's privilege I took;


And, drawing to his side, to him did say,


"This morning gives us promise of a glorious day."


13


85 A gentle answer did the old Man make,


In courteous speech which forth he slowly drew:


And him with further words I thus bespake,


"What occupation do you there pursue?


This is a lonesome place for one like you."


90 Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise


Broke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes.


14


His words came feebly, from a feeble chest,


But each in solemn order followed each,


With something of a lofty utterance drest�


95 Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach


Of ordinary men; a stately speech;


Such as grave Livers5 do in Scotland use,


Religious men, who give to God and man their dues.


15


He told, that to these waters he had come


100 To gather leeches,6 being old and poor:


Employment hazardous and wearisome!


And he had many hardships to endure:


From pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor;


Housing, with God's good help, by choice or chance;


105 And in this way he gained an honest maintenance.


16


The old Man still stood talking by my side;


But now his voice to me was like a stream


5. Those who live gravely (as opposed to "loose erer, bare legged in shallow water, stirred the water livers," those who live for a life of pleasure). to attract them and, when they fastened them


6. Used by medical attendants to draw their selves to his legs, picked them off. patients' blood for curative purposes. A leech gath


.


I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD / 305


Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;


And the whole body of the Man did seem


no Like one whom I had met with in a dream;


Or like a man from some far region sent,


To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.


17


My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills;


And hope that is unwilling to be fed;


115 Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;


And mighty Poets in their misery dead.


�Perplexed, and longing to be comforted,


My question eagerly did I renew,


"How is it that you live, and what is it you do?"


18


120 He with a smile did then his words repeat;


And said, that, gathering leeches, far and wide


He travelled; stirring thus about his feet


The waters of the pools where they abide.


"Once I could meet with them on every side;


125 But they have dwindled long by slow decay;


Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may."


19


While he was talking thus, the lonely place,


The old Man's shape, and speech�all troubled me:


In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace


130 About the weary moors continually,


Wandering about alone and silently.


While I these thoughts within myself pursued,


He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed.


20


And soon with this he other matter blended,


135 Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,


But stately in the main; and when he ended,


I could have laughed myself to scorn to find


In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.


"God," said I, "be my help and stay7 secure;


140 I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!" May 3-July 4, 1802 1807


I wandered lonely as a cloud1


I wandered lonely as a cloud


That floats on high o'er vales and hills,


When all at once I saw a crowd,


7. Support (a noun). see Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, 1. For the original experience, two years earlier, April 15, 1802 (p. 396).


.


30 6 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H 5A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine 10And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. isThe waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed�and gazed�but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: 20For 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 fills, And dances with the daffodils. 1804 1807


My heart leaps up


My heart leaps up when I behold


A rainbow in the sky:


So was it when my life began;


So is it now I am a man;


5 So be it when I shall grow old,


Or let me die!


The Child is father of the Man;


And I could wish my days to be


Bound each to each by natural piety.1


Mar. 26, 1802 1807


Ode: Intimations of Immortality In 1843 Wordsworth said about this Ode to Isabella Fenwick:


This was composed during my residence at Town End, 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


I. Perhaps as distinguished from piety based on the Bible, in which the rainbow is the token of God's promise to Noah and his descendants never again to send a flood to destroy the earth.


.


ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY / 307


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 [in the opening stanza of "We Are Seven"]:


�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 [Genesis 5.22�24; 2 Kings 2.11], 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 communed 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 dreamlike vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood, everyone, 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. 49 [W]hen I


4


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 humanity for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet.


When he dictated this long note to Isabella Fenwick, at the age of seventy-two or seventy-three, Wordsworth was troubled by objections that his apparent claim for the preexistence of the soul violated the Christian belief that the soul, although it survives after death, does not exist before the birth of an individual. His claim in the note is that he refers to the preexistence of the soul not in order to set out a religious doctrine but only so as to deal "as a Poet" with a common human experience: that the passing of youth involves the loss of a freshness and radiance investing everything one sees. Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," which he wrote (in its earliest version) after he had heard the first four stanzas of Wordsworth's poem, employs a similar figurative technique for a comparable, though more devastating, experience of loss.


The original published text of this poem (in 1807) had as its title only "Ode," and then as epigraph "Paulo maiora canamus" (Latin for "Let us sing of somewhat higher things") from Virgil's Eclogue 4.


.


308 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Ode


Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood


The Child is Father of the Man;


And I could wish my days to be


Bound each to each by natural piety.1


1


There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,


The earth, and every common sight,


To me did seem


Apparelled in celestial light,


5 The glory and the freshness of a dream.


It is not now as it hath been of yore;�


Turn wheresoe'er I may,


By night or day,


The things which I have seen I now can see no more.


2


io The Rainbow comes and goes,


And lovely is the Rose,


The Moon doth with delight


Look round her when the heavens are bare,


Waters on a starry night


15 Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth;


But yet I know, where'er I go,


That there hath past away a glory from the earth. 3


Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,


20 And while the young Iambs bound


As to the tabor's2 sound,


To me alone there came a thought of grief:


A timely utterance3 gave that thought relief,


And I again am strong:


25 The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;


No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;


I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,


The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,4


And all the earth is gay;


30 Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity,


And with the heart of May


Doth every Beast keep holiday;�


Thou Child of Joy,


35 Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy


Shepherd-boy!


1. The concluding lines of Wordsworth's "My all. heart leaps up" (p. 306). 4. Of the many suggested interpretations, the sim


2. A small drum often used to beat time for danc-plest is "from the fields where they were sleeping." ing. Wordsworth often associated a rising wind with the


3. Perhaps "My heart leaps up," perhaps "Reso-revival of spirit and of poetic inspiration (see, e.g., lution and Independence," perhaps not a poem at the opening passage of The Prelude, p. 324).


.


ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY / 309


4


Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call


Ye to each other make; I see


The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;


My heart is at your festival,


40 My head hath its coronal,5 The fulness of your bliss, I feel�I feel it all.


Oh evil day! if I were sullen


While Earth herself is adorning,


This sweet May-morning,


45 And the Children are culling


On every side,


In a thousand valleys far and wide,


Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,


And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:�


50 I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! �But there's a Tree, of many, one,


A single Field which I have looked upon,


Both of them speak of something that is gone:


The Pansy at my feet


55 Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam?


Where is it now, the glory and the dream? 5


Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:


The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,6


60 Hath had elsewhere its setting,


And cometh from afar:


Not in entire forgetfulness,


And not in utter nakedness,


But trailing clouds of glory do we come


65 From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!


Shades of the prison-house begin to close


Upon the growing Boy,


But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,


70 He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east


Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,


And by the vision splendid


Is on his way attended;


75 At length the Man perceives it die away,


And fade into the light of common day.


6


Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;


Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,


And, even with something of a Mother's mind,


so And no unworthy aim, The homely7 Nurse doth all she can


5. Circlet of wildflowers, with which the shepherd 6. The sun, as metaphor for the soul. boys trimmed their hats in May. 7. In the old sense: simple and friendly.


.


310 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,


Forget the glories he hath known,


And that imperial palace whence he came. 7


85 Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,


A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!


See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,


Fretted8 by sallies of his mother's kisses,


With light upon him from his father's eyes!


90 See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,


Some fragment from his dream of human life,


Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;


A wedding or a festival,


A mourning or a funeral;


95 And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song:


Then will he fit his tongue


To dialogues of business, love, or strife;


But it will not be long


IOO Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride


The little Actor cons� another part; studies Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"9


With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,


105 That Life brings with her in her equipage;


As if his whole vocation


Were endless imitation.


8


Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie


Thy Soul's immensity;


i 10 Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep


Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,


That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,


Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,�


Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!


115 On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find,


In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;


Thou, over whom thy Immortality


Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,


120 A Presence which is not to be put by; Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might


Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,


Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke


The years to bring the inevitable yoke,


125 Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,


And custom lie upon thee with a weight,


Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!


8. Irritated; or possibly in the old sense: checkered cious" and also referred to the various characters over. and temperaments ("humors") represented in


9. From a sonnet by the Elizabethan poet Samuel drama. Daniel. In Daniel's era humorous meant "capri


.


ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY / 311


9


O joy! that in our embers


Is something that doth live,


That nature yet remembers


What was so fugitive!0 fleeting


The thought of our past years in me doth breed


Perpetual benediction: not indeed


For that which is most worthy to be blest;


Delight and liberty, the simple creed


Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,


With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:�


Not for these I raise


The song of thanks and praise;


But for those obstinate questionings


Of sense and outward things,


Fallings from us, vanishings;


Blank misgivings of a Creature


Moving about in worlds not realised,1


High instincts before which our mortal Nature


Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:


But for those first affections,


Those shadowy recollections,


Which, be they what they may,


Are yet the fountain light of all our day,


Are yet a master light of all our seeing;


Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make


Our noisy years seem moments in the being


Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,


To perish never;


Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,


Nor Man nor Boy,


Nor all that is at enmity with joy,


Can utterly abolish or destroy!


Hence in a season of calm weather


Though inland far we be,


Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea


Which brought us hither,


Can in a moment travel thither,


And see the Children sport upon the shore,


And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.


Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!


And let the young Lambs bound


As to the tabor's sound!


We in thought will join your throng,


Ye that pipe and ye that play,


Ye that through your hearts to-day


Feel the gladness of the May!


What though the radiance which was once so bright


Be now for ever taken from my sight,


Though nothing can bring back the hour


1. Not seeming real (see Wordsworth's comment about "this abyss of idealism" in the headnote on p. 306).


.


312 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;


We will grieve not, rather find


180


Strength in what remains behind;


In the primal sympathy


Which having been must ever be;


In the soothing thoughts that spring


Out of human suffering;


185 In the faith that looks through death,


In years that bring the philosophic mind.


II


And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,


Forebode0 not any severing of our loves! predict, portend


Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;


190 I only have relinquished one delight


To live beneath your more habitual sway.


I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,


Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;


The innocent brightness of a new-born Day


195 Is lovely yet;


The Clouds that gather round the setting sun


Do take a sober colouring from an eye


That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;


Another race hath been, and other palms are won.2


200 Thanks to the human heart by which we live,


Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,


To me the meanest flower that blows can give


Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 1802-04 1807


Ode to Duty1


Jam non consilio bonus, sed more eo per ductus, ut non tantum recte


facere possim, sed nisi recte facere non possim.2


Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!3


O Duty! if that name thou love


2. In Greece foot races were often run for the prize Thomas Gray and rejected the personifications of a branch or wreath of palm. Wordsworth's line that were customary in 18th-century poetry,


echoes Paul, 1 Corinthians 9.24, who uses such Wordsworth here reverts to a standard 18th


races as a metaphor for life: "Know ye not that they century form, an ode addressed to a personified


which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the abstraction.


prize?" 2. Now I am not good by conscious intent, but


1. This Ode .. . is on the model of Gray's "Ode to have been so trained by habit that I not only can Adversity" which is copied from Horace's "Ode to act rightly but am unable to act other than rightly


Fortune." Many and many a time have I been twit-(Latin). Added in 1837, this epigraph is an adap


ted by my wife and sister for having forgotten this tation from Moral Epistles 120.10 by Seneca (4


dedication of myself to the stern lawgiver [Words-B.c.E�65 C.E.), Stoic philosopher and writer of


worth's note, 1843]. tragedies.


In this poem, a striking departure from his 3. Cf. Milton's Paradise Lost 9.652-54. Eve for a


earlier forms and ideas, Wordsworth abandons moment resists the serpent's recommendation of


the descriptive-meditative pattern of his "Tintern the forbidden fruit by stating, "God so com-


Abbey" and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." manded, and left that Command / Sole Daughter


Where in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of 1802 of his voice; the rest, we live / Law to ourselves,


he had both disparaged the 18th-century poet our Reason is our Law."


.


OD E TO DUT Y / 31 3 Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove; Thou, who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe; From vain temptations dost set free; And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity! There are who ask not if thine eye Be on them; who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense4 of youth: Glad Hearts! without reproach or blot; Who do thy work, and know it not: Oh! if through confidence misplaced They fail, thy saving arms, dread Power! around them cast. Serene will be our days and bright, And happy will our nature be, When love is an unerring light, And joy its own security. And they a blissful course may hold Even now, who, not unwisely bold, Live in the spirit of this creed; Yet seek thy firm support, according to their need. I, loving freedom, and untried; No sport of every random gust, Yet being to myself a guide, Too blindly have reposed my trust: And oft, when in my heart was heard Thy timely mandate, I deferred The task, in smoother walks to stray; But thee I now would serve more strictly, if I may. Through no disturbance of my soul, Or strong compunction5 in me wrought, I supplicate for thy control; But in the quietness of thought: Me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance-desires: My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same. Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we any thing so fair As is the smile upon thy face: Flowers laugh before thee on their beds And fragrance in thy footing treads; 4 . 5. Innate vitality. In the older sense: sting of conscience, or remorse.


.


314 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;


And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong. To humbler functions, awful Power!


50 1 call thee: I myself commend


Unto thy guidance from this hour;


Oh, let my weakness have an end!


Give unto me, made lowly wise,6


The spirit of self-sacrifice;


55 The confidence of reason give; And in the light of truth thy Bondman7 let me live!


1804 1807


The Solitary Reaper1


Behold her, single in the field,


Yon solitary Highland Lass!


Reaping and singing by herself;


Stop here, or gently pass!


5 Alone she cuts and binds the grain,


And sings a melancholy strain;


O listen! for the Vale profound


Is overflowing with the sound. No Nightingale did ever chaunt


10 More welcome notes to weary bands


Of travellers in some shady haunt,


Among Arabian sands:


A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard


In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,


15 Breaking the silence of the seas


Among the farthest Hebrides.2


Will no one tell me what she sings?3 Perhaps the plaintive numbers0 flow verses


For old, unhappy, far-off things,


20 And battles long ago:


Or is it some more humble lay,


Familiar matter of to-day?


Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,


That has been, and may be again?


6. Another echo from Milton. The angel Raphael guage of Scotland] as she bended over her sickle; had advised Adam (Paradise Lost 8.173�74), "Be the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains


lowly wise: / Think only what concerns thee and were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long


thy being." after they were heard no more." In 1803 William


7. Man in bondage, serf or slave. and Mary Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and 1. One of the rare poems not based on Words-Coleridge toured Scotland, making a pilgrimage to worth's own experience. In a note published with Robert Burns's grave and visiting places mentioned


the poem in 1807, Wordsworth says that it was in Walter Scott's historical notes to his Minstrelsysuggested by a passage in Thomas Wilkinson's of the Scottish Border.


Tours to the British Mountains (1824), which he 2. Islands off the west coast of Scotland.


had seen in manuscript: "Passed a female who was 3. The poet does not understand Erse, the lan


reaping alone: she sung in Erse [the Gaelic lan-guage in which she sings.


.


ELEGIA C STANZA S / 31 5 2530 Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending;� I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more. Nov. 5, 1805 1807


Elegiac Stanzas


Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm,


Painted by Sir George Beaumont1 I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!0 building


Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:


I saw thee every day; and all the while


Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. s So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!


So like, so very like, was day to day!


Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;


It trembled, but it never passed away. How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;


io No mood, which season takes away, or brings:


I could have fancied that the mighty Deep


Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things. Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter's hand,


To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,


is The light that never was, on sea or land,


The consecration, and the Poet's dream; I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile


Amid a world how different from this!


Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;


20 On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine


Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;


�Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine


The very sweetest had to thee been given. 25 A Picture had it been of lasting ease,


Elysian2 quiet, without toil or strife;


1. A wealthy landscape painter who was Words-years before he saw Beaumont's painting. worth's patron and close friend. Peele Castle is on 2. Referring to Elysium, in classical my thology the


an island opposite Rampside, Lancashire, where peaceful place where those favored by the gods


Wordsworth had spent a month in 1794, twelve dwelled after death.


.


316 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,


Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,


30 Such Picture would I at that time have made:


And seen the soul of truth in every part,


A stedfast peace that might not be betrayed. So once it would have been,�'tis so no more;


I have submitted to a new control:


35 A power is gone, which nothing can restore;


A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.3 Not for a moment could I now behold


A smiling sea, and be what I have been:


The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old;


40 This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,


If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,0 mourn


This work of thine I blame not, but commend;


This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. 45 O 'tis a passionate Work!�yet wise and well,


Well chosen is the spirit that is here;


That Hulk� which labours in the deadly swell, ship


This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,


50 I love to see the look with which it braves,


Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,


The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,


Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!0 humankind


55 Such happiness, wherever it be known,


Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind. But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,


And frequent sights of what is to be borne!


Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.�


60 Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. Summer 1806 1807


3. Captain John Wordsworth, William's brother, had been drowned in a shipwreck on February 5, 1805. He is referred to in lines 41�42.


.


IT IS A BEAUTEOUS EVENING / 317


SONNETS


Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 18021


Earth has not any thing to show more fair:


Dull would he be of soul who could pass by


A sight so touching in its majesty:


This City now doth, like a garment, wear


5 The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,


Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie


Open unto the fields, and to the sky;


All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.


Never did sun more beautifully steep


10 In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;


Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!


The river glideth at his own sweet will:


Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;


And all that mighty heart is lying still! 1802 1807


It is a beauteous evening


It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,


The holy time is quiet as a Nun


Breathless with adoration; the broad sun


Is sinking down in its tranquillity;


5 The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea:


Listen! the mighty Being is awake,


And doth with his eternal motion make


A sound like thunder�everlastingly.


Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,2


10 If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,


Thy nature is not therefore less divine:


Thou liest in Abraham's bosom3 all the year;


And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,


God being with thee when we know it not. Aug. 1802 1807


1. The date of this experience was not September four that follow. 3, but July 31, 1802. Its occasion was a trip to 2. The girl walking with Wordsworth is Caroline,


France, made possible by a brief truce in the war his daughter by Annette Vallon. For the event


(see Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, described see Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere


July 1802, p. 400). Wordsworth's conflicted feel-Journals, July 1802 (p. 400).


ings about this return to France, where he had 3. Where the souls destined for heaven rest after


once supported the Revolution and loved Annette death. Luke 16.22: "And it came to pass, that the


Vallon, inform a number of personal and political beggar died, and was carried by the angels into


sonnets that he wrote in 1802, among them the Abraham's bosom."


.


318 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


To Toussaint l'Ouverture4


Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!


Whether the rural Milk-maid by her Cow


Sing in thy hearing, or thou liest now


Alone in some deep dungeon's earless den,


5 O miserable Chieftain! where and when


Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou


Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:


Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again,


Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind


10 Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;


There's not a breathing of the common wind


That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;


Thy friends are exultations, agonies,


And love, and Man's unconquerable mind. 1802 1803


September 1st, 18025


We had a fellow-Passenger who came


From Calais with us, gaudy in array,


A Negro Woman like a Lady gay,


Yet silent as a woman fearing blame;


5 Dejected, meek, yea pitiably tame,


She sat, from notice turning not away,


But on our proffered kindness still did lay


A weight of languid speech, or at the same


Was silent, motionless in eyes and face.


10 She was a Negro Woman driv'n from France,


Rejected like all others of that race,


Not one of whom may now find footing there;


This the poor Out-cast did to us declare,


Nor murmured at the unfeeling Ordinance. 1802 1803


4. First published in the Morning Post, Feb. 2, in prison in April 1803. 1803. Francois Dominique Toussaint, later called 5. First published, with the title "The Banished


L'Ouverture (ca. 1743�1803), was a self-educated Negroes," in the Morning Post, Feb. 11, 1803. In


slave who became leader of the slave rebellion in 1827 Wordsworth added an explanatory headnote


Haiti and governor of Santo Domingo. For oppos-beneath the title: "Among the capricious acts of


ing Napoleon's edict reestablishing slavery (abol-tyranny that disgraced those times, was the chasing


ished in France and its colonial possessions in the of all Negroes from France by decree of the gov


early stages of the Revolution), Toussaint was ernment: we had a Fellow-passenger who was one


arrested and taken to Paris in June 1802. He died of the expelled."


.


THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US / 319


London, 18026


Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:


England hath need of thee: she is a fen


Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,


Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,


5


Have forfeited their ancient English dower0 endowment, gift


Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;


Oh! raise us up, return to us again;


And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.


Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:


10 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:


Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,


So didst thou travel on life's common way,


In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart


The lowliest duties on herself did lay. Sept. 1802 1807


The world is too much with us


The world is too much with us; late and soon,


Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:


Little we see in Nature that is ours;


We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!7


5 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;


The winds that will be howling at all hours,


And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;


For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;


It moves us not.�Great God! I'd rather be


10 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;


So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,


Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;


Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;


Or hear old Triton8 blow his wreathed horn. 1802-04 1807


6. One of a series "written immediately after my 1843]. return from France to London, when I could not 7. Gift. It is the act of giving the heart away that


but be struck, as here described, with the vanity is sordid.


and parade of our own country .. . as contrasted 8. A sea deity, usually represented as blowing on


with the quiet, and I may say the desolation, that a conch shell. Proteus was an old man of the sea


the revolution had produced in France. This must who (in the Odyssey) could assume a variety of


be borne in mind, or else the reader may think that shapes. The description of Proteus echoes Paradise


in this and the succeeding sonnets 1 have exagger-Lost 3.603�04, and that of Triton echoes Edmund


ated the mischief engendered and fostered among Spenser's Colin Clotits Come Home Againe, lines


us by undisturbed wealth" [Wordsworth's note, 244-45.


.


320 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Surprised by joy9


Surprised by joy�impatient as the Wind


I turned to share the transport�Oh! with whom


But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,


That spot which no vicissitude can find?


5 Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind�


But how could I forget thee? Through what power,


Even for the least division of an hour,


Have I been so beguiled as to be blind


To my most grievous loss!�That thought's return


10 Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,


Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,


Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;


That neither present time, nor years unborn


Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.


1813-14 1815


Mutability1


From low to high doth dissolution climb,


And sink from high to low, along a scale


Of awful� notes, whose concord shall not fail; awe-inspiring


A musical but melancholy chime,


5 Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,


Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.


Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear


The longest date do melt like frosty rime,


That in the morning whitened hill and plain


10 And is no more; drop like the tower sublime


Of yesterday, which royally did wear


His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain


Some casual shout that broke the silent air,


Or the unimaginable touch of Time.


1821 1822


Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways2


Motions and Means, on land and sea at war


With old poetic feeling, not for this,


9. This was in fact suggested by my daughter Church of England. Catherine, long after her death [Wordsworth's 2. In late middle age Wordsworth demonstrates,


note], Catherine Wordsworth died June 4, 1812, as he had predicted in the Preface to Lyrical Bal


at the age of four. lads, that the poet will assimilate to his subject


1. This late sonnet was included in an otherwise matter the "material revolution" produced by scirather uninspired sequence, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, ence.


dealing with the history and ceremonies of the


.


EXTEMPORE EFFUSION UPON THE DEATH OF JAMES HOGG / 32 1


Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!


Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar


The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar


To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense


Of future change, that point of vision, whence


May be discovered what in soul ye are.


In spite of all that beauty may disown


io In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace


Her lawful offspring in Man's art: and Time,


Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,


Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown


Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.


1833 1835


Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg1


When first, descending from the moorlands,


I saw the Stream of Yarrow2 glide


Along a bare and open valley,


The Ettrick Shepherd3 was my guide. 5 When last along its banks I wandered,


Through groves that had begun to shed


Their golden leaves upon the pathways,


My steps the Border-minstrel4 led. The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,


io 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;


And death upon the braes5 of Yarrow,


Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes: Nor has the rolling year twice measured,


From sign to sign, its stedfast course,


15 Since every mortal power of Coleridge


Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,


The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:


And Lamb,6 the frolic and the gentle,


20 Has vanished from his lonely hearth. Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,


Or waves that own no curbing hand,


1. Wordsworth's niece relates how he was deeply 2. A river in the southeast of Scotland. moved by finding unexpectedly in a newspaper an 3. I.e., Hogg, who was born in Ettrick Forest (an


account of the death of the poet James Hogg. "Half area in southeast Scotland near the border with


an hour afterwards he came into the room where England) and worked as a shepherd. He was dis-


the ladies were sitting and asked Miss Hutchinson covered as a writer by Sir Walter Scott and became


[his sister-in-law] to write down some lines which well known as a poet, essayist, editor, and novelist.


he had just composed." All the writers named here, 4. Sir Walter Scott.


several of Wordsworth's closest friends among 5. The sloping banks of a stream.


them, had died between 1832 and 1835. 6. The essayist Charles Lamb.


.


322 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land!


25 Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber Were earlier raised, remain to hear A timid voice, that asks in whispers, "Who next will drop and disappear?"


Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,


30 Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe!7 forth-looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath.


As if but yesterday departed, Thou too art gone before; but why, 35 O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered, Should frail survivors heave a sigh?


Mourn rather for that holy Spirit, Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; For Her8 who, ere her summer faded,


40 Has sunk into a breathless sleep.


No more of old romantic sorrows, For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid! With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten, And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead.


Nov. 21, 1835 1835


The Prelude The Prelude, now regarded as Wordsworth's crowning achievement, was unknown to the public at the time of his death in April 1850. When, three months later, it was published from manuscript by Wordsworth's literary executors, its title was given to it by the poet's wife, Mary. Wordsworth had referred to it variously as "the poem to Coleridge," "the poem on the growth of my own mind," and "the poem on my own poetical education."


For some seventy-five years this posthumous publication of 1850 was the only known text. Then in 1926 Ernest de Selincourt, working from manuscripts, printed an earlier version of the poem that Wordsworth had completed in 1805. Since that time other scholars have established the existence of a still earlier and much shorter version of The Prelude, in two parts, that Wordsworth had composed in 1798�99. The following seems to have been the process of composition that produced the three principal versions of the poem:


1. The Two-Part Prelude of 1799. Wordsworth originally planned, early in 1798, to include an account of his own development as a poet in his projected but never- completed philosophical poem The Recluse. While living in Germany during the autumn and winter of 1798�99, he composed a number of passages about his early experiences with nature. What had been intended to be part of The Recluse, however, 7. George Crabbe, the poet of rural and village 8. The poet Felicia Hemans, who died at forty- life, with whom Wordsworth contrasts himself in two.


his comment on "Lucy Gray" (see p. 277).


.


THE PRELUDE / 323


quickly evolved into an independent autobiographical poem, and by late 1799, when Wordsworth settled with his sister, Dorothy, at Grasmere, he had written a two-part, 978-line poem which describes his life from infancy, through his years at Hawkshead School, to the age of seventeen. This poem corresponds, by and large, to the contents of books 1 and 2 of the later versions of The Prelude.


2. The 1805 Prelude. Late in 1801 Wordsworth began to expand the poem on his poetic life, and in 1804 he set to work intensively on the project. His initial plan was to write it in five books, but he soon decided to enlarge it to incorporate an account of his experiences in France and of his mental crisis after the failure of his hopes in the French Revolution, and to end the poem with his settlement at Grasmere and his taking up the great task of The Recluse. He completed the poem, in thirteen books, in May 1805. This is the version that Wordsworth read to Coleridge after the Iatter's return from Malta (see Coleridge's "To William Wordsworth," p. 471). 3. The 1850 Prelude. For the next thirty-five years, Wordsworth tinkered with the text. He polished the style and softened some of the challenges to religious orthodoxy that he had set out in his earlier statements about the godlike powers of the human mind in its communion with nature; he did not, however, in any essential way alter its subject matter or overall design. The Prelude that was published in July 1850 is in fourteen books, it incorporated Wordsworth's latest revisions, which had been made in 1839, as well as some alterations introduced by his literary executors. The selections printed here�from W. J. B. Owen's Cornell Wordsworth volume, The Fourteen- Book Prelude (1985)�are from the manuscript of this final version. Our reasons for choosing this version are set forth in Jack Stillinger's "Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth," Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 3�28. When Wordsworth enlarged the two-part Prelude of 1 799, he not only made it a poem of epic length but also heightened the style and introduced various thematic parallels with earlier epics, especially Paradise Lost. The expanded poem, however, is a personal history that turns on a mental crisis and recovery, and for such a narrative design the chief prototype is not the classical or Christian epic but the spiritual autobiography of crisis. St. Augustine's Confessions established this central Christian form late in the fourth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, published between 1780 and 1789, and quickly translated into English from French, renewed this autobiographical form for writers of Wordsworth's generation.


As in many versions of spiritual autobiography, Wordsworth's persistent metaphor is that of life as a circular journey whose end (as T. S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets, his adaptation of the traditional form) is "to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time" (Little Gidding, lines 241�42). Wordsworth's Prelude opens with a literal journey whose chosen goal (1.72, 106�07) is "a known Vale whither my feet should turn"�that is, the Vale of Grasmere. The Prelude narrates a number of later journeys, most notably the crossing of the Alps in book 6 and, at the beginning of the final book, the climactic ascent of Mount Snowdon. In the course of the poem, such literal journeys become the metaphoric vehicle for a spiritual journey�the quest, within the poet's memory, and in the very process of composing his poem, for his lost early self and his proper spiritual home. At its end the poem, rounding back on its beginning, leaves the poet at home in the Vale of Grasmere, ready finally to begin his great project The Recluse (14.302�11, 374�85). It is in this sense that the poem is a "prelude"�preparation for the "honorable toil" (1.626) for which, having discovered his vocation, the mature writer is ready at last.


Although the episodes of The Prelude are recognizable events from Wordsworth's life, they are interpreted in retrospect, reordered in sequence, and retold as dramas involving the interaction between the mind and nature and between the creative imagination and the force of history. And although the narrator is recognizably William Wordsworth, addressing the entire poem as a communication to his friend Cole- ridge, he adopts the prophetic persona, modeled on the poet-prophets of the Bible, which John Milton had adopted in narrating Paradise Lost (13.300�11). In this way


.


324 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Wordsworth, like his great English predecessor, assumes the authority to speak as a national poet whose function is to reconstitute the grounds of hope in a dark time of postrevolutionary reaction and despair. As Wordsworth describes it (2.433�42), he speaks out


in these times of fear,


This melancholy waste of hopes overthrown,


. . . 'mid indifference and apathy


And wicked exultation, when good men,


On every side, fall off, we know not how,


To selfishness, disguised in gentle names Of peace and quiet and domestic love


. . . this time Of dereliction and dismay. . . .


FROM THE PRELUDE OR GROWTH OF A POET'S MIND


Long months of peace (if such bold word accord


AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POEM Book First Introduction, Childhood, and School-time 5io0 there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that, while he fans my cheek, Doth seem half-conscious of the joy he brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate'er his mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast City,0 where I long have pinedA discontented Sojourner�Now free, Free as a bird to settle where I will, What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream Shall with its murmur lull me into rest? London The earth is all before me:1 with a heart is20 Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, 1 look about; and should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. I breathe again; Trances of thought and mountings of the heart Come fast upon me: it is shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self, The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me.


1. One of many echoes from Paradise Lost, where being expelled from Eden: "The world was all the line is applied to Adam and Eve as, at the con-before them" (12.646).


clusion of the poem, they begin their new life after


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK FIRST / 325


25 With any promises of human life),


Long months of ease and undisturbed delight


Are mine in prospect;0 whither shall I turn, anticipation


By road or pathway, or through trackless field,


Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing


30 Upon the River point me out my course?


Dear Liberty! Yet what would it avail,


But for a gift that consecrates the joy?


For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven


Was blowing on my body, felt, within,


35 A correspondent breeze, that gently moved


With quickening virtue,2 but is now become


A tempest, a redundant0 energy, abundant


Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both,


And their congenial0 powers that, while they join kindred


40 In breaking up a long continued frost, Bring with them vernal0 promises, the hope springtime


Of active days urged on by flying hours;


Days of sweet leisure taxed with patient thought


Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,


45 Matins and vespers, of harmonious verse!3 Thus far, O Friend!4 did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of a Song,5


Pour forth, that day, my soul in measured strains,


That would not be forgotten, and are here


50 Recorded:�to the open fields I told


A prophecy:�poetic numbers0 came verse


Spontaneously, to clothe in priestly robe


A renovated0 Spirit singled out, renewed


Such hope was mine, for holy services:


55 My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's


Internal echo of the imperfect sound;


To both I listened, drawing from them both


A chearful confidence in things to come.


Content, and not unwilling now to give


60 A respite to this passion,6 I paced on With brisk and eager steps; and came at length


To a green shady place where down I sate


Beneath a tree, slackening my thoughts by choice,


And settling into gentler happiness.


65 'Twas Autumn, and a clear and placid day,


2. Revivifying power. ("To quicken" is to give or breeze and breath, at once materia] and spiritual, restore life.) is represented in other Romantic poems, such as


3. I.e., verses equivalent to morning prayers (mat-Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and Percy Shelley's ins) and evening prayers (vespers). The opening "Ode to the West Wind" as well as in the opening


passage (lines 1�45), which Wordsworth calls in letter of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.


book 7, line 4, a "glad preamble," replaces the tra-4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom Wordsworth


ditional epic device, such as Milton had adopted addresses the whole of the Prelude. For Coleridge's


in Paradise Lost, of an opening prayer to the Muse response, after the poem was read to him, see "To


for inspiration. To be "inspired," in the literal William Wordsworth" (p. 471).


sense, is to be breathed or blown into by a divinity 5. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth


(in Latin spirare means both "to breathe" and "to says that his poetry usually originates in "emotion


blow"). Wordsworth begins his poem with a "bless-recollected in tranquillity"; hence not, as in the


ing" from an outer "breeze," which (lines 34�45) preceding preamble, during the experience that it


is called the "breath of heaven" and evokes in him, records.


in response, an inner, "correspondent" breeze, a 6. I.e., "and willing to prolong the passion."


burst of inspiration. The power of this revivifying


.


326 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


With warmth, as much as needed, from a sun


Two hours declined towards the west, a day


With silver clouds, and sunshine on the grass,


And, in the sheltered and the sheltering grove,


70 A perfect stillness. Many were the thoughts


Encouraged and dismissed, till choice was made


Of a known Vale7 whither my feet should turn,


Nor rest till they had reached the very door


Of the one Cottage which methought I saw.


75 No picture of mere memory ever looked


So fair; and while upon the fancied scene


I gazed with growing love, a higher power


Than Fancy gave assurance of some work


Of glory, there forthwith to be begun,


so Perhaps too there performed.8 Thus long I mused,


Nor e'er lost sight of what I mused upon,


Save where, amid the stately grove of Oaks,


Now here�now there�an acorn, from its cup


Dislodged, through sere leaves rustled, or at once


85 To the bare earth dropped with a startling sound. From that soft couch I rose not, till the sun


Had almost touched the horizon; casting then


A backward glance upon the curling cloud


Of city smoke, by distance ruralized,


90 Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive,


But as a Pilgrim resolute, I took,


Even with the chance equipment of that hour, The road that pointed tow'rd the chosen Vale. It was a splendid evening: and my Soul 95 Once more made trial of her strength, nor lacked


Eolian visitations;9 but the harp


Was soon defrauded, and the banded host


Of harmony dispersed in straggling sounds;


And lastly utter silence! "Be it so;


IOO Why think of any thing but present good?"


So, like a Home-bound Labourer, I pursued


My way, beneath the mellowing sun, that shed


Mild influence;1 nor left in me one wish


Again to bend the sabbath of that time2


105 To a servile yoke. What need of many words?


A pleasant loitering journey, through three days


Continued, brought me to my hermitage.


I spare to tell of what ensued, the life


In common things,�the endless store of things


no Rare, or at least so seeming, every day Found all about me in one neighbourhood; The self-congratulation," and from morn self-rejoicing


7. Grasmere, where Wordsworth settled with his with music to gusts of a breeze. For a description sister, Dorothy, in December 1799. of this instrument, see Coleridge's The Eolian


8. I.e., The Recluse, which Wordsworth planned Harp, n. 1, p. 426. to be his major poetic work. 1. An astrological term for the effect of stars on


9. Influences to which his soul responded as an human life. Eolian harp, placed in an open window, responds 2. That time of rest.


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK FIRST / 327


To night unbroken cheerfulness serene.


But speedily an earnest longing rose


us To brace myself to some determined aim,


Reading or thinking; either to lay up


New stores, or rescue from decay the old


Ry timely interference: and therewith


Came hopes still higher, that with outward life


120 I might endue" some airy phantasies invest That had been floating loose about for years;


And to such Beings temperately deal forth


The many feelings that oppressed my heart.


That hope hath been discouraged; welcome light


125 Dawns from the East, but dawns�to disappear


And mock me with a sky that ripens not


Into a steady morning: if my mind,


Remembering the bold promise of the past,


Would gladly grapple with some noble theme,


BO Vain is her wish: where'er she turns, she finds


Impediments from day to day renewed. And now it would content me to yield up


Those lofty hopes awhile for present gifts


Of humbler industry. But, O dear Friend!


135 The Poet, gentle Creature as he is, Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times,


His fits when he is neither sick nor well,


Though no distress be near him but his own


Unmanageable thoughts: his mind, best pleas'd


HO While she, as duteous as the Mother Dove,


Sits brooding,3 lives not always to that end,


But, like the innocent Bird, hath goadings on


That drive her, as in trouble, through the groves:


With me is now such passion, to be blamed


145 No otherwise than as it lasts too long. When as becomes a Man who would prepare


For such an arduous Work, I through myself


Make rigorous inquisition, the report


Is often chearing; for I neither seem


150 To lack that first great gift, the vital Soul, Nor general Truths, which are themselves a sort


Of Elements and Agents, Under-powers,


Subordinate helpers of the living Mind:


Nor am I naked of external things,


155 Forms, images, nor numerous other aids Of less regard, though won perhaps with toil,


And needful to build up a Poet's praise.


Time, place, and manners do I seek, and these


Are found in plenteous store, but no where such


160 As may be singled out with steady choice:


No little band of yet remembered names


Whom I in perfect confidence might hope


3. An echo of Milton's reference in Paradise Lost to the original act of creation in his invocation to the Holy Spirit: Thou "Dovelike satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And mad'st it pregnant" (1.21�22).


.


328 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


To summon back from lonesome banishment, And make them dwellers in the hearts of men


165 Now living, or to live in future years. Sometimes the ambitious Power of choice, mistaking Proud spring-tide swellings for a regular sea, Will settle on some British theme, some old Romantic Tale by Milton left unsung:4


170 More often turning to some gentle place Within the groves of Chivalry, I pipe To Shepherd Swains, or seated, harp in hand, Amid reposing knights by a River side Or fountain, listen to the grave reports


175 Of dire enchantments faced, and overcome By the strong mind, and Tales of warlike feats Where spear encountered spear, and sword with sword Fought, as if conscious of the blazonry That the shield bore, so glorious was the strife;


180 Whence inspiration for a song that winds Through ever changing scenes of votive quest,5 Wrongs to redress, harmonious tribute paid To patient courage and unblemished truth, To firm devotion, zeal unquenchable, 185 And Christian meekness hallowing faithful loves.6 Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate How vanquished Mithridates northward passed, And, hidden in the cloud of years, became Odin, the Father of a Race by whom i9o Perished the Roman Empire;7 how the friends And followers of Sertorius, out of Spain Flying, found shelter in the Fortunate Isles; And left their usages, their arts, and laws To disappear by a slow gradual death; 195 To dwindle and to perish, one by one, Starved in those narrow bounds: but not the soul Of Liberty, which fifteen hundred years Survived, and, when the European came With skill and power that might not be withstood, 200 Did, like a pestilence, maintain its hold, And wasted down by glorious death that Race Of natural Heroes;8�or I would record How, in tyrannic times, some high-souled Man, Unnamed among the chronicles of Kings,


4. In Paradise Lost 9.24-41 Milton relates that, in revenge on the conquering Romans links him to seeking a subject for his epic poem, he rejected other figures whom Wordsworth here considers as


"fabled Knights" and medieval romance. potential subjects for his poem, all of them battlers


5. A quest undertaken to fulfill a vow. against tyranny. 6. An echo of the prefatory statement to Spenser's 8. Sertorius, a Roman general allied with Mithri- Faerie Qiteene, line 9: "Fierce warres and faithfull dates, fought off the armies of Pompey and others


loves shall moralize my song." until he was assassinated in 72 B.C.E. There is a


7. Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, was defeated by legend that after his death his followers, to escape the Roman Pompey in 66 B.C.E. In his Decline and Roman tyranny, fled from Spain to the Canary


Fall of the Roman Empire (published between Islands (known in ancient times as "the Fortunate


1776 and 1788), the historian Edward Gibbon had Isles," line 192), where their descendants flour-


discussed Mithridates as a historical prototype for ished until subjugated and decimated by invading


the legendary Norse god Odin. Mithridates' deter-Spaniards late in the 1 5th century.


mination to found a family line that would take


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK FIRST / 329


205 Suffered in silence for truth's sake: or tell


How that one Frenchman, through continued force


Of meditation on the inhuman deeds


Of those who conquered first the Indian isles,


Went, single in his ministry, across 210 The Ocean;�not to comfort the Oppressed,


But, like a thirsty wind, to roam about,


Withering the Oppressor:9�how Gustavus sought


Help at his need in Dalecarlia's mines:1


How Wallace2 fought for Scotland, left the name 215 Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower, All over his dear Country, left the deeds Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts, To people the steep rocks and river banks, Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul


220 Of independence and stern liberty. Sometimes it suits me better to invent A Tale from my own heart, more near akin To my own passions, and habitual thoughts, Some variegated Story, in the main 225 Lofty, but the unsubstantial Structure melts Before the very sun that brightens it, Mist into air dissolving! Then, a wish, My last and favourite aspiration, mounts, With yearning, tow'rds some philosophic Song 230 Of Truth3 that cherishes our daily life; With meditations passionate, from deep Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre;4 But from this awful burthen I full soon 235 Take refuge, and beguile myself with trust That mellower years will bring a riper mind And clearer insight. Thus my days are passed In contradiction; with no skill to part Vague longing, haply bred by want of power, 240 From paramount impulse�not to be withstood; A timorous capacity from prudence; From circumspection, infinite delay.5 Humility and modest awe themselves Betray me, serving often for a cloke 245 To a more subtile selfishness; that now Locks every function up in blank0 reserve,0 absolute / inaction Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye That with intrusive restlessness beats off


9. Dominique de Gourges, a French gentleman to Bannockburn," p. 145. who went in 1568 to Florida to avenge the mas-3. I.e., The Recluse.


sacre of the French by the Spaniards there [foot-4. The lyre of Orpheus. In Greek myth Orpheus


note in The Prelude of 1850]. was able to enchant not only human listeners but


1. Gustavus I of Sweden (1496-1530) worked to also the natural world by his singing and playing. advance Sweden's liberation from Danish rule 5. The syntax is complex and inverted; in outline


while toiling in disguise as a miner in his country's the sense of lines 238�42 seems to be: "With no


Dalecarlia mines. ability ('skill') to distinguish between vague desire


2. William Wallace, Scottish patriot, fought (perhaps, 'haply,' resulting from lack of power) and against the English until captured and executedin ruling impulse; between endless procrastination


1305. See Robert Burns's "Robert Bruce's March and carefulness ('circumspection')."


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33 0 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H Simplicity, and self-presented truth. 250 Ah! better far than this, to stray about Voluptuously,0 through fields and rural walks, luxuriously And ask no record of the hours, resigned To vacant musing, unreproved neglect Of all things, and deliberate holiday: 255 Far better never to have heard the name Of zeal and just ambition, than to live Baffled and plagued by a mind that every hour Turns recreant0 to her task, takes heart again, unfaithful Then feels immediately some hollow thought 260 Hang like an interdict0 upon her hopes. prohibition This is my lot; for either still I find Some imperfection in the chosen theme; Or see of absolute accomplishment Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself 265 That I recoil and droop, and seek repose In listlessness from vain perplexity; Unprofitably travelling toward the grave, Like a false Steward who hath much received, And renders nothing back.6 Was it for this7 270 That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song; And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this didst Thou, 275 O Derwent! winding among grassy holms8 Where I was looking on, a Babe in arms, Make ceaseless music, that composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me, Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind, 280 A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves? When he had left the mountains, and received On his smooth breast the shadow of those Towers That yet survive, a shattered Monument 285 Of feudal sway, the bright blue River passed Along the margin of our Terrace Walk;9 A tempting Playmate whom we dearly loved. O many a time have I, a five years' Child, In a small mill-race1 severed from his stream, 290 Made one long bathing of a summer's day; Basked in the sun, and plunged, and basked again, Alternate all a summer's day, or scoured2 The sandy fields, leaping through flow'ry groves Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,


6. The reference is to Christ's parable of the stew-9. The Derwent River flows by Cockermouth ard who fails to use his talents (literally, the coins Castle and then past the garden terrace behind his master has entrusted to him and, figuratively, Wordsworth's father's house in Cockermouth, his God-given abilities) in Matthew 25.14-30. Cumberland. 7. The two-part Prelude that Wordsworth wrote in 1. The current that drives a mill wheel. 1798-99 begins at this point. 2. Run swiftly over. 8. Flat ground next to a river.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 33 1


The woods and distant Skiddaw's3 lofty height, Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone Beneath the sky, as if I had been born On Indian plains, and from my Mother's hut Had run abroad in wantonness,0 to sport, frolic A naked Savage, in the thunder shower.


Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear; Much favoured in my birth-place, and no less In that beloved Vale4 to which erelong We were transplanted�there were we let loose For sports of wider range. Ere I had told Ten birth-days, when among the mountain slopes Frost, and the breath of frosty wind, had snapped The last autumnal Crocus, 'twas my joy, With store of Springes0 o'er my Shoulder slung, bird, snares To range the open heights where woodcocks ran Along the smooth green turf. Through half the night, Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied That anxious visitation;�moon and stars Were shining o'er my head; I was alone, And seemed to be a trouble to the peace That dwelt among them. Sometimes it befel, In these night-wanderings, that a strong desire O'erpowered my better reason, and the Bird Which was the Captive of another's toil3 Became my prey; and when the deed was done I heard, among the solitary hills, Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod.


Nor less, when Spring had warmed the cultured0 Vale, cultivated Roved we as plunderers where the Mother-bird Had in high places built her lodge; though mean0 of little value Our object, and inglorious, yet the end0 outcome Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung Above the Raven's nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill-sustained; and almost (so it seemed) Suspended by the blast that blew amain, Shouldering the naked crag; Oh, at that time, While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears! the sky seemed not a sky Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds!


Dust as we are, the immortal Spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. How strange that all


3. A mountain nine miles east of Cockermouth. head, where Wordsworth attended school. 4. The valley of Esthwaite, the location of Hawks-5. Snare or labor.


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33 2 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


345 The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, interfused Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part, And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I


350 Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end! Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ! Whether her fearless visitings or those That came with soft alarm like hurtless lightning Opening the peaceful clouds, or she would use


355 Severer interventions, ministry More palpable, as best might suit her aim.


One summer evening (led by her) I found A little Boat tied to a Willow-tree Within a rocky cave, its usual home.


360 Straight I unloosed her chain, and, stepping in, Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice Of mountain-echoes did my Boat move on, Leaving behind her still, on either side,


365 Small circles glittering idly in the moon, Until they melted all into one track Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows (Proud of his skill) to reach a chosen point With an unswerving line, I fixed my view


370 Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, The horizon's utmost boundary; for above Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. She was an elfin Pinnace;0 lustily small boat I dipped my oars into the silent lake; 375 And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the Water like a swan: When, from behind that craggy Steep, till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct,0 endowed 380 Upreared its head.6�I struck, and struck again, And, growing still in stature, the grim Shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion, like a living Thing


385 Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the Covert0 of the Willow-tree; shelter


There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,� And through the meadows homeward went, in grave


390 And serious mood; but after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts


6. To direct his boat in a straight line, the rower moves farther out, the black peak rises into his (sitting facing the stern of the boat) has fixed his altering angle of vision and seems to stride closer eye on a point on the ridge above the nearby shore, with each stroke of the oars. which blocks out the landscape behind. As he


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 333


There hung a darkness, call it solitude


395 Or blank desertion. No familiar Shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or Sky, no colours of green fields, But huge and mighty Forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind


400 By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.


Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe! Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought, That giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting Motion! not in vain,


405 By day or star-light, 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, inferior / commonplace But with high objects, with enduring things,


410 With life and nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying, by such discipline, Both pain and fear; until we recognize A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.


415 Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me With stinted kindness. In November days When vapours, rolling down the valley, made A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights,


420 When, by the margin of the trembling Lake, Beneath the gloomy hills homeward I went In solitude, such intercourse was mine: Mine was it, in the fields both day and night, And by the waters, all the summer long.


425 �And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile, The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom, I heeded not their summons,�happy time It was indeed for all of us; for me


430 It was a time of rapture!�Clear and loud The village Clock toll'd six�I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home.�All shod with steel,� i.e., on skates We hissed along the polished ice, in games 435 Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures,�the resounding horn, The Pack loud-chiming and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle: with the din 440 Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed while the stars, 445 Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away.


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33 4 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay,�or sportively Glanced sideway,7 leaving the tumultous throng To cut across the reflex0 of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me�even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal0 round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,0 Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.


Ye presences of Nature, in the sky, And on the earth! Ye visions of the hills! And Souls8 of lonely places! can I think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry, when ye, through many a year, Haunting me thus among my boyish sports, On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impressed upon all forms the characters0 Of danger or desire; and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With triumph and delight, with hope and fear, Work0 like a sea?


Not uselessly employed, Might I pursue this theme through every change Of exercise and play, to which the year Did summon us in his delightful round.


�We were a noisy crew; the sun in heaven Beheld not vales more beautiful than ours, Nor saw a Band in happiness and joy Richer, or worthier of the ground they trod. I could record with no reluctant voice The woods of Autumn, and their hazel bowers With milk-white clusters hung; the rod and line, True symbol of hope's foolishness, whose strong And unreproved enchantment led us on, By rocks and pools shut out from every star All the green summer, to forlorn cascades Among the windings hid of mountain brooks. �Unfading recollections! at this hour The heart is almost mine with which I felt, From some hill-top on sunny afternoons, The paper-Kite, high among fleecy clouds,


reflection


daily succession


signs


seethe


7. Moved off obliquely. 02) and to plural "Presences" and "Souls" animat8. Wordsworth refers both to a single "Spirit" or ing the various parts of the universe. "Soul" of the universe as a whole (e.g., lines 401�


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 335


495 Pull at her rein, like an impatient Courser;0 swift horse


Or, from the meadows sent on gusty days,


Beheld her breast the wind, then suddenly


Dashed headlong, and rejected by the storm.


Ye lowly Cottages in which we dwelt, 500 A ministration of your own was yours!


Can I forget you, being as ye were


So beautiful among the pleasant fields


In which ye stood? or can I here forget


The plain and seemly countenance with which 505 Ye dealt out your plain Comforts? Yet had ye Delights and exultations of your own. Eager and never weary, we pursued Our home-amusements by the warm peat-fire At evening, when with pencil, and smooth slate


5i'o In square divisions parcelled out, and all With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o'er, We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head, In strife too humble to be named in verse;9 Or round the naked table, snow-white deal,0 pine or fir 515 Cherry, or maple, sate in close array, And to the Combat, Lu or Whist, led on A thick-ribbed Army, not as in the world Neglected and ungratefully thrown by Even for the very service they had wrought, 520 But husbanded through many a long campaign. Uncouth assemblage was it, where no few Had changed their functions; some, plebeian cards Which Fate, beyond the promise of their birth, Had dignified, and called to represent 525 The Persons of departed Potentates.1 Oh, with what echoes on the board they fell! Ironic diamonds; Clubs, Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, A congregation piteously akin! Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit, 530 Those sooty Knaves, precipitated down With scoffs and taunts like Vulcan2 out of heaven; The paramount Ace, a moon in her eclipse, Queens gleaming through their Splendor's last decay, And Monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained 535 By royal visages.3 Meanwhile abroad Incessant rain was falling, or the frost Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth; And, interrupting oft that eager game,


9. I.e., ticktacktoe. With his phrasing in this passage, Wordsworth pokes fun at 18th-century poetic diction, which avoided everyday terms by using elaborate paraphrases. 1. The cards have changed their functions in ways that remind us that the first version of The Prelude was begun soon after the downfall of the French monarchy during the Revolution. The "Potentate" cards�the kings, queens, and jacks�have over time been lost from the pack and so selected "plebeian," or commoner, cards have come to be used in their place.


2. Roman god of fire and forge. His mother, Juno, when he was born lame, threw him down from Olympus, the home of the gods. 3. Wordsworth implicitly parallels the boys' card games to the mock-epic description of the aristocratic game of ombre in Pope's The Rape of the Lock 3.37-98.


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33 6 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills, a loud Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves Howling in Troops along the Bothnic Main.4 Nor, sedulous0 as I have been to trace diligent How Nature by extrinsic passion first Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair And made me love them, may I here omit How other pleasures have been mine, and joys Of subtler origin; how I have felt, Not seldom even in that tempestuous time, Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense Which seem, in their simplicity, to own An intellectual5 charm;�that calm delight Which, if I err not, surely must belong To those first-born0 affinities that fit innate Our new existence to existing things, And, in our dawn of being, constitute The bond of union between life and joy. Yes, I remember when the changeful earth And twice five summers on my mind had stamped The faces of the moving year, even then I held unconscious intercourse with beauty Old as creation, drinking in a pure Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths Of curling mist, or from the level plain Of waters, colored by impending0 clouds. overhanging The sands of Westmorland, the creeks and bays Of Cumbria's0 rocky limits, they can tell Cumberland's How, when the Sea threw off his evening shade, And to the Shepherd's hut on distant hills Sent welcome notice of the rising moon, How I have stood, to fancies such as these A Stranger, linking with the Spectacle No conscious memory of a kindred sight, And bringing with me no peculiar sense Of quietness or peace, yet have I stood, Even while mine eye hath moved o'er many a league6 Of shining water, gathering, as it seemed, Through every hair-breadth in that field of light, New pleasure, like a bee among the flowers. Thus oft amid those fits of vulgar7 joy Which, through all seasons, on a Child's pursuits Are prompt Attendants; 'mid that giddy bliss Which like a tempest works along the blood And is forgotten: even then I felt Gleams like the flashing of a shield,�the earth And common face of Nature spake to me Rememberable things; sometimes, 'tis true, By chance collisions and quaint accidents


4. A northern gulf of the Baltic Sea. 6. A distance equal to approximately three miles. 5. Spiritual, as opposed to sense perceptions. 7. Ordinary, commonplace.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 33 7


590 (Like those ill-sorted unions, work supposed


Of evil-minded fairies), yet not vain Nor profitless, if haply they impressed Collateral0 objects and appearances, secondary Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep 595 Until maturer seasons called them forth To impregnate and to elevate the mind. �And, if the vulgar joy by its own weight Wearied itself out of the memory, The scenes which were a witness of that joy 6oo Remained, in their substantial lineaments Depicted on the brain, and to the eye Were visible, a daily sight: and thus By the impressive discipline of fear, By pleasure and repeated happiness,


605 So frequently repeated, and by force


Of obscure feelings representative


Of things forgotten; these same scenes so bright,


So beautiful, so majestic in themselves,


Though yet the day was distant, did become


6io Habitually dear; and all their forms And changeful colours by invisible links Were fastened to the affections.0 feelings I began My Story early, not misled, I trust, By an infirmity of love for days 615 Disowned by memory,8 fancying flowers where none, Not even the sweetest, do or can survive For him at least whose dawning day they cheered; Nor will it seem to Thee, O Friend! so prompt In sympathy, that I have lengthened out, 620 With fond and feeble tongue, a tedious tale. Meanwhile, my hope has been, that I might fetch Invigorating thoughts from former years; Might fix the wavering balance of my mind, And haply meet reproaches too, whose power 625 May spur me on, in manhood now mature, To honorable toil. Yet should these hopes Prove vain, and thus should neither I be taught To understand myself, nor thou to know With better knowledge how the heart was framed 630 Of him thou Iovest, need I dread from thee Harsh judgments, if the Song be loth to quit Those recollected hours that have the charm Of visionary things, those lovely forms And sweet sensations that throw back our life, 635 And almost make remotest infancy A visible scene, on which the sun is shining? One end at least hath been attained�my mind Hath been revived; and, if this genial9 mood Desert me not, forthwith shall be brought down


8. I.e., he hopes that he has not mistakenly attrib- he can no longer remember, uted his later thoughts and feelings to a time of life 9. Productive, creative.


.


33 8 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H 640 Through later years the story of my life: The road lies plain before me,� tis a theme Single, and of determined bounds; and hence I chuse it rather, at this time, than work Of ampler or more varied argument, 645 Where I might be discomfited and lost; And certain hopes are with me that to thee This labour will be welcome, honoured Friend! Book Second School-time continued Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving much Unvisited, endeavoured to retrace The simple ways in which my childhood walked, Those chiefly, that first led me to the love 5 Of rivers, woods, and fields. The passion yet Was in its birth, sustained, as might befal, By nourishment that came unsought; for still, From week to week, from month to month, we lived A round of tumult. Duly0 were our games appropriately io Prolonged in summer till the day-light failed; No chair remained before the doors, the bench And threshold steps were empty; fast asleep The Labourer, and the old Man who had sate, A later Lingerer, yet the revelry 15 Continued, and the loud uproar; at last, When all the ground was dark, and twinkling stars Edged the black clouds, home and to bed we went, Feverish, with weary joints and beating minds. Ah! is there One who ever has been young 20 Nor needs a warning voice to tame the pride Of intellect, and virtue's self-esteem? One is there,1 though the wisest and the best Of all mankind, who covets not at times Union that cannot be; who would not give, 25 If so he might, to duty and to truth The eagerness of infantine desire? A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, 30 Which yet have such self-presence0 in my mind, actuality That, musing on them, often do I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being. A rude mass Of native rock, left midway in the Square 35 Of our small market Village, was the goal Or centre of these sports; and, when, returned After long absence, thither I repaired, 1. I.e., "Is there anyone ...'? "


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 339


Gone was the old grey stone, and in its place A smart Assembly-room usurped the ground


40 That had been ours.2 There let the fiddle scream, And be ye happy! Yet, my Friends,3 I know That more than one of you will think with me Of those soft starry nights, and that old Dame From whom the Stone was named, who there had sate


45 And watched her table with its huckster's wares0 peddler's goods Assiduous, through the length of sixty years. �We ran a boisterous course, the year span round With giddy motion. But the time approached That brought with it a regular desire


50 For calmer pleasures, when the winning forms Of Nature were collaterally attached4 To every scheme of holiday delight, And every boyish sport, less grateful0 else pleasing And languidly pursued.


When summer came,


55 Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays, To sweep along the plain of Windermere With rival oars; and the selected bourne0 destination Was now an Island musical with birds That sang and ceased not; now a sister isle,


60 Beneath the oaks' umbrageous0 covert, sown shaded With lilies of the valley like a field; And now a third small island,5 where survived, In solitude, the ruins of a shrine Once to our Lady dedicate, and served


65 Daily with chaunted rites. In such a race, So ended, disappointment could be none, Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy; We rested in the Shade, all pleased alike, Conquered and Conqueror. Thus the pride of strength,


70 And the vain-glory of superior skill, Were tempered, thus was gradually produced A quiet independence of the heart: And, to my Friend who knows me, I may add, Fearless of blame, that hence, for future days,


75 Ensued a diffidence and modesty; And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, The self-sufficing power of solitude.


Our daily meals were frugal, Sabine fare!6 More than we wished we knew the blessing then


so Of vigorous hunger�hence corporeal strength Unsapped by delicate viands;0 for, exclude food A little weekly stipend,7 and we lived Through three divisions of the quartered year


2. The Hawkshead Town Hall, built in 1790. 6. Like the meals of the Roman poet Horace on 3. Coleridge and John Wordsworth (William's his Sabine farm. brother), who had visited Hawkshead together 7. In his last year at school, Wordsworth had an with William in November 1799. allowance of sixpence a week; his younger brother 4. Associated as an accompaniment. Christopher, threepence. After the Midsummer 5. The island of Lady Holm, former site of a and Christmas holidays (line 85), the boys received chapel dedicated to the Virgin Marv. a larger sum, ranging up to a guinea.


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34 0 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


In pennyless poverty. But now, to school


85 From the half-yearly holidays returned, We came with weightier purses, that sufficed To furnish treats more costly than the Dame Of the old grey stone, from her scanty board, supplied. Hence rustic dinners on the cool green ground,


90 Or in the woods, or by a river side, Or shady fountains,0 while among the leaves springs, streams Soft airs were stirring, and the mid-day sun Unfelt shone brightly round us in our joy.


Nor is my aim neglected if I tell


95 How sometimes, in the length of those half years, We from our funds drew largely�proud to curb, And eager to spur on, the gallopping Steed: And with the cautious Inn-keeper, whose Stud Supplied our want, we haply might employ


ioo Sly subterfuges, if the Adventure's bound Were distant, some famed Temple8 where of yore0 long ago The Druids worshipped, or the antique Walls Of that large Abbey which within the Vale Of Nightshade, to St Mary's honour built,


105 Stands yet, a mouldering Pile,0 with fractured arch, building in ruin Belfry, and Images, and living Trees; A holy Scene!9�Along the smooth green Turf Our Horses grazed:�to more than inland peace Left by the west wind sweeping overhead


i 10 From a tumultuous ocean, trees and towers In that sequestered Valley may be seen Both silent and both motionless alike; Such the deep shelter that is there, and such The safeguard for repose and quietness.


115 Our Steeds remounted, and the summons given, With whip and spur we through the Chauntry1 flew In uncouth race, and left the cross-legged Knight And the Stone-abbot, and that single Wren Which one day sang so sweetly in the Nave


120 Of the old Church, that, though from recent Showers The earth was comfortless, and, touched by faint Internal breezes, sobbings of the place And respirations, from the roofless walls The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still


125 So sweetly 'mid the gloom the invisible Bird Sang to herself, that there I could have made My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there To hear such music. Through the Walls we flew, And down the Valley, and, a circuit made


130 In wantonness0 of heart, through rough and smooth playfulness We scampered homewards. Oh, ye rocks and streams, And that still Spirit shed from evening air!


8. The stone circle at Swinside, on the lower Dud-Hawkshead. don River, mistakenly believed at the time to have 1. A chapel endowed for masses to be sung for the been a Druid temple. donor. 9. Fumess Abbey, some twenty miles south of


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 341


Even in this joyous time I sometimes felt


Your presence, when with slackened step we breathed2 135 Along the sides of the steep hills, or when,


Lighted by gleams of moonlight from the sea,


We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand.


Midway on long Winander's Eastern shore,


Within the crescent of a pleasant Bay, ho A Tavern3 stood, no homely-featured House, Primeval like its neighbouring Cottages; But 'twas a splendid place, the door beset With Chaises, Grooms, and Liveries,�and within Decanters, Glasses, and the blood-red Wine. 145 In ancient times, or ere the Hall was built


On the large Island,4 had this Dwelling been


More worthy of a Poet's love, a Hut


Proud of its one bright fire and sycamore shade.


But, though the rhymes were gone that once inscribed 150 The threshold, and large golden characters0 letters Spread o'er the spangled sign-board had dislodged The old Lion, and usurped his place in slight And mockery of the rustic Painter's hand, Yet to this hour the spot to me is dear 155 With all its foolish pomp. The garden lay Upon a slope surmounted by the plain Of a small Bowling-green: beneath us stood A grove, with gleams of water through the trees And over the tree-tops; nor did we want 160 Refreshment, strawberries, and mellow cream. There, while through half an afternoon we played On the smooth platform, whether skill prevailed Or happy blunder triumphed, bursts of glee Made all the mountains ring. But ere night-fall, 165 When in our pinnace0 we returned, at leisure small boat Over the shadowy Lake, and to the beach Of some small Island steered our course with one, The Minstrel of our Troop, and left him there, And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute 170 Alone upon the rock,�Oh then the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream! 175 Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus Daily the common range of visible things Grew dear to me: already I began To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun, Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge 180 And surety of our earthly life, a light Which we behold, and feel we are alive; Nor for his bounty to so many worlds,


2. Slowed to let the horses catch their breath. 4. The Hall on Belle Isle in Lake Windermere had 3. The White Lion at Bowness. been built in the early 1780s.


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34 2 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


But for this cause, that I had seen him lay


His beauty on the morning hills, had seen


The western mountain touch his setting orb,


In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess


Of happiness, my blood appear'd to flow


For its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy;


And from like feelings, humble though intense,


To patriotic and domestic love


Analogous, the moon to me was dear;


For I would dream away my purposes,


Standing to gaze upon her while she hung


Midway between the hills, as if she knew


No other region; but belonged to thee,


Yea, appertained by a peculiar right


To thee, and thy grey huts,' thou one dear Vale!


Those incidental charms which first attached


My heart to rural objects, day by day


Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell


How Nature, intervenient6 till this time


And secondary, now at length was sought


For her own sake. But who shall7 parcel out


His intellect, by geometric rules,


Split like a province into round and square?


Who knows the individual hour in which


His habits were first sown, even as a seed?


Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say,


"This portion of the river of my mind


Came from yon fountain"? Thou, my friend! art one


More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee


Science8 appears but what in truth she is,


Not as our glory and our absolute boast,


But as a succedaneum,9 and a prop


To our infirmity. No officious0 slave intrusive


Art thou of that false secondary power1


By which we multiply distinctions, then


Deem that our puny boundaries are things


That we perceive, and not that we have made.


To thee, unblinded by these formal arts,


The unity of all hath been revealed;


And thou wilt doubt with me, less aptly skilled


Than many are to range the faculties


In scale and order, class the cabinet2


Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase3


Run through the history and birth of each


As of a single independent thing.


Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind,


If each most obvious and particular thought,


5. Cottages built of gray stones. 6. I.e., entering incidentally into his other concerns. 7. Is able to. 8. In the old sense: learning. 9. In medicine a drug substituted for a different drug. Wordsworth, however, uses the term to signify a remedy, or palliative.


1. The analytic faculty of the mind, as contrasted with the power to apprehend "the unity of all" (line 221).


2. To classify, as if arranged in a display case. 3. In fluent words.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 343


230 Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weighed, Hath no beginning.


Blest the infant Babe, (For with my best conjecture I would trace Our Being's earthly progress) blest the Babe,


235 Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep Rocked on his Mother's breast; who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with a human soul, Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!4 For him, in one dear Presence, there exists


240 A virtue which irradiates and exalts Objects through widest intercourse of sense. No outcast he, bewildered and depressed; Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond


245 Of nature that connect him with the world. Is there a flower to which he points with hand Too weak to gather it, already love Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him Hath beautified that flower; already shades


250 Of pity cast from inward tenderness Do fall around him upon aught that bears Unsightly marks of violence or harm. Emphatically such a Being lives, Frail Creature as he is, helpless as frail,


255 An inmate of� this active universe. a dweller in For feeling has to him imparted power That through the growing faculties of sense Doth, like an Agent of the one great Mind, Create, creator and receiver both,


260 Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds.5�Such, verily, is the first Poetic spirit of our human life, By uniform control of after years In most abated or suppressed, in some,


265 Through every change of growth and of decay, Preeminent till death.


From early days, Beginning not long after that first time In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch, I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart,6


270 I have endeavoured to display the means Whereby this infant sensibility, Great birth-right of our being, was in me Augmented and sustained. Yet is a path More difficult before me, and I fear


4. Like the modern psychologist, Wordsworth rec-ceives what would otherwise be an alien world as ognized the importance of earliest infancy in the a place to which he has a relationship like that of development of the individual mind, although he a son to a mother (lines 239�45). On such grounds had then to invent the terms with which to analyze Wordsworth asserts that the mind partially creates, the process. by altering, the world it seems simply to perceive. 5. The infant, in the sense of security and love 6. I.e., both infant and mother feel the pulse of shed by his mother's presence on outer things, per-the other's heart.


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34 4 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


275 That, in its broken windings, we shall need The chamois'7 sinews, and the eagle's wing: For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes. I was left alone, Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why.


280 The props of my affections were removed,8 And yet the building stood, as if sustained By its own spirit! All that I beheld Was dear, and hence to finer influxes0 influences The mind lay open, to a more exact


285 And close communion. Many are our joys In youth, but Oh! what happiness to live When every hour brings palpable access Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, And sorrow is not there! The seasons came,


290 And every season, wheresoe'er I moved, Unfolded0 transitory qualities revealed Which, but for this most watchful power of love, Had been neglected, left a register Of permanent relations, else unknown.9


295 Hence life, and change, and beauty; solitude More active even than "best society,"1 Society made sweet as solitude By inward concords, silent, inobtrusive; And gentle agitations of the mind


300 From manifold distinctions, difference Perceived in things where, to the unwatchful eye, No difference is, and hence, from the same source, Sublimer joy: for I would walk alone Under the quiet stars, and at that time


305 Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or Image unprofaned: and I would stand, If the night blackened with a coming storm, Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are


310 The ghostly0 language of the ancient earth, disembodied Or make their dim abode in distant winds. Thence did I drink the visionary power; And deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation: not for this, 315 That they are kindred to our purer mind And intellectual life;2 but that the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, whereto 320 With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still


7. An agile species of antelope inhabiting moun- relations" now recorded in his memory would have tainous regions of Europe. been unknown. 8. Wordsworth's mother had died the month 1. A partial quotation of a line spoken by Adam to before his eighth birthday. Eve in Paradise Lost 9.249: "For solitude some9. I.e., had it not been for the watchful power of times is best society." love (line 292), the "transitory qualities" (291) 2. I.e., not because they are related to the non- would have been neglected, and the "permanent sensuous ("intellectual") aspect of our life.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 345


That, whatsoever point they gain, they yet Have something to pursue. And not alone 'Mid gloom and tumult, but no less 'mid fair


325 And tranquil scenes, that universal power And fitness in the latent qualities And essences of things, by which the mind Is moved with feelings of delight, to me Came strengthened with a superadded soul,


330 A virtue not its own.�My morning walks Were early;�oft before the hours of School I travelled round our little Lake, five miles Of pleasant wandering; happy time! more dear For this, that One was by my side, a Friend3


335 Then passionately loved; with heart how full Would he peruse these lines! for many years Have since flowed in between us, and, our minds Both silent to each other, at this time We live as if those hours had never been.


340 Nor seldom did I lift our Cottage latch Far earlier, and ere one smoke-wreath had risen From human dwelling, or the thrush, high perched, Piped to the woods his shrill reveille,4 sate Alone upon some jutting eminence 345 At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale, Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude. How shall I seek the origin, where find Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt? Oft in those moments such a holy calm 350 Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes5


Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw Appeared like something in myself, a dream, A prospect0 in the mind. scene


'Twere long to tell What spring and autumn, what the winter snows,


355 And what the summer shade, what day and night, Evening and morning, sleep and waking thought, From sources inexhaustible, poured forth To feed the spirit of religious love, In which I walked with Nature- But let this


360 Be not forgotten, that I still retained My first creative sensibility, That by the regular action of the world


My soul was unsubdued. A plastic0 power shaping Abode with me, a forming hand, at times


365 Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local Spirit of his own, at war With general tendency, but, for the most, Subservient strictly to external things With which it communed. An auxiliar light


3. Identifiedas John Fleming in a note to the 1850 4. The signal given to awaken soldiers, edition. 5. As opposed to the mind's eye, inner vision.


.


34 6 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


370 Came from my mind which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendor; the melodious birds, The fluttering breezes, fountains that ran on Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed A like dominion; and the midnight storm


375 Grew darker in the presence of my eye; Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, And hence my transport.0 exaltation


Nor should this, perchance, Pass unrecorded, that I still0 had loved always The exercise and produce of a toil


380 Than analytic industry to me More pleasing, and whose character I deem Is more poetic, as resembling more Creative agency. The Song would speak Of that interminable building reared


385 By observation of affinities In objects where no brotherhood exists To passive minds. My seventeenth year was come; And, whether from this habit rooted now So deeply in my mind, or from excess


390 Of the great social principle of life Coercing all things into sympathy, To unorganic Natures were transferred My own enjoyments; or the Power of truth, Coming in revelation, did converse


395 With things that really are;6 I, at this time, Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. Thus while the days flew by and years passed on, From Nature overflowing on my soul I had received so much, that every thought


400 Was steeped in feeling; I was only then Contented when with bliss ineffable I felt the sentiment of Being spread O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still; O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought


405 And human knowledge, to the human eye Invisible, yet liveth to the heart; O'er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings, Or beats the gladsome air; o'er all that glides Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,


410 And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not If high the transport, great the joy I felt, Communing in this sort through earth and Heaven With every form of Creature, as it looked


Towards the Uncreated0 with a countenance God 415 Of adoration, with an eye of love.7 One song they sang, and it was audible,


6. Wordsworth is careful to indicate that there are alternative explanations for his sense that life pervades the inorganic as well as the organic world: it may be the result either of a way of perceiving that has been habitual since infancy or of a projection of his own inner life, or else it may be the perception of an objective truth.


7. Wordsworth did not add lines 412�14, which frame his experience of the "one life" in Christian terms, until the last revision of The Prelude, in 1839.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 347


Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear, O'ercome by humblest prelude of that strain, Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed.


420 If this be error, and another faith Find easier access to the pious mind,8 Yet were I grossly destitute of all Those human sentiments that make this earth So dear, if I should fail with grateful voice


425 To speak of you, Ye Mountains, and Ye Lakes, And sounding Cataracts, Ye Mists and Winds That dwell among the Hills where I was born. If in my Youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content


430 With my own modest pleasures, and have lived, With God and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires, The gift is yours: if in these times of fear,


This melancholy waste" of hopes o'erthrown, wasteland


435 If, 'mid indifference and apathy And wicked exultation, when good men, On every side, fall off, we know not how, To selfishness, disguised in gentle names Of peace and quiet and domestic love,


440 Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers On visionary minds; if, in this time Of dereliction and dismay,9 I yet Despair not of our Nature, but retain A more than Roman confidence, a faith


445 That fails not, in all sorrow my support, The blessing of my life, the gift is yours, Ye Winds and sounding Cataracts, 'tis yours, Ye Mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed My lofty speculations; and in thee,


450 For this uneasy heart of ours, I find A never-failing principle of joy And purest passion.


Thou, my Friend! wert reared In the great City, 'mid far other scenes;1 But we, by different roads, at length have gained


455 The self-same bourne.0 And for this cause to Thee destination I speak, unapprehensive of contempt, The insinuated scoff of coward tongues, And all that silent language which so oft, In conversation between Man and Man,


460 Blots from the human countenance all trace Of beauty and of love. For Thou hast sought The truth in solitude, and, since the days That gave thee liberty, full long desired,


8. Compare "Tintern Abbey" lines 43�50, ending clamping down on all forms of political expression with "If this / Be but a vain belief. .." (p. 259). that resembled, even faintly, French ideas. 9. The era, some ten years after the start of the 1. A reminiscence of Coleridge's "Frost at Mid- French Revolution, was one of violent reaction. night," lines 51�52: "For I was reared / In the great Many earlier sympathizers were abandoning their city, pent 'mid cloisters dim." radical beliefs, and the British government was


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34 8 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


To serve in Nature's Temple, thou hast been


465 The most assiduous of her Ministers,2 In many things my Brother, chiefly here In this our deep devotion.


Fare Thee well! Health, and the quiet of a healthful mind, Attend Thee! seeking oft the haunts of Men,


470 And yet more often living with thyself And for thyself, so haply shall thy days Be many, and a blessing to mankind.


From Book Third Residence at Cambridge


[ARRIVAL AT ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE. "THE GLORY OF MY YOUTH"]


It was a drear)' Morning when the Wheels Rolled over a wide plain o'erhung with clouds, And nothing cheered our way till first we saw The long-roof'd Chapel of King's College lift


5 Turrets, and pinnacles in answering files Extended high above a dusky grove.


Advancing, we espied upon the road A Student, clothed in Gown and tasselled Cap, Striding along, as if o'ertasked by Time


10 Or covetous of exercise and air. He passed�nor was I Master of my eyes Till he was left an arrow's flight behind. As near and nearer to the Spot we drew, It seemed to suck us in with an eddy's force;


15 Onward we drove beneath the Castle, caught, While crossing Magdalene Bridge, a glimpse of Cam,1 And at the Hoop alighted, famous Inn!


My Spirit was up, my thoughts were full of hope; Some friends I had, acquaintances who there


20 Seemed friends, poor simple School-boys! now hung round With honor and importance: in a world Of welcome faces up and down I roved; Questions, directions, warnings, and advice Flowed in upon me, from all sides; fresh day


25 Of pride and pleasure! to myself I seemed A man of business and expence, and went From shop to shop, about my own affairs, To Tutor or to Tailor, as befel, From street to street, with loose and careless mind.


30


I was the Dreamer, they the dream: I roamed Delighted through the motley spectacle;


2. Wordsworth may be recalling the conclusion of on a "sea-cliff's verge," "O Liberty! my spirit felt Coleridge's "France: An Ode" (1798), where, dis-thee there." Wordsworth added lines 461�64 some illusioned about the promise of liberty by the years after Coleridge's death in 1834. French Revolution, he writes that, while standing I. The river that flows through Cambridge.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 349


Gowns grave or gaudy, Doctors, Students, Streets, Courts, Cloisters, flocks of Churches, gateways, towers. Migration strange for a Stripling0 of the Hills, youngster


35 A Northern Villager! As if the change Had waited on some Fairy's wand, at once Behold me rich in monies; and attired In splendid garb, with hose� of silk, and hair stockings Powdered like rimy2 trees, when frost is keen.


40 My lordly dressing-gown, I pass it by, With other signs of manhood that supplied0 compensated for The lack of beard.�The weeks went roundly on With invitations, suppers, wine and fruit, Smooth housekeeping within, and all without


45 Liberal,0 and suiting Gentleman's array! generous


The Evangelist St. John my Patron was;3 Three gothic Courts are his, and in the first Was my abiding-place, a nook obscure! Right underneath, the College Kitchens made


50 A humming sound, less tuneable than bees, But hardly less industrious; with shrill notes Of sharp command and scolding intermixed. Near me hung Trinity's loquacious Clock, Who never let the quarters, night or day,


55 Slip by him unproclaimed, and told the hours Twice over, with a male and female voice. Her pealing Organ was my neighbour too; And from my pillow, looking forth by light Of moon or favoring stars, I could behold


60 The Antechapel, where the Statue stood Of Newton, with his prism,4 and silent face: The marble index of a Mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.


Of College labors, of the Lecturer's room


65 All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand, With loyal Students faithful to their books, Half-and-half Idlers, hardy Recusants,5 And honest Dunces�of important days, Examinations when the man was weighed


70 As in a balance! of excessive hopes, Tremblings withal, and commendable fears; Small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad, Let others, that know more, speak as they know. Such glory was but little sought by me 75 And little won. Yet, from the first crude days Of settling time in this untried abode, I was disturbed at times by prudent thoughts,


2. Covered with rime, frosted over. Fashion John's College, stands Roubiliac's statue of New- required the late-18th-century gentleman to wear ton holding the prism with which he had con- powder in his hair. ducted the experiments described in his Optics 3. Wordsworth was a student at St. Johns Col-(1704). lege, Cambridge University, in 1787�91. Book 3 5. Those who do not conform to college discipline, deals with his first year there, when he was particularly regulations about religious obserseventeen. vance. 4. In the west end of Trinity Chapel, adjoining St.


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35 0 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Wishing to hope, without a hope; some fears About my future worldly maintenance;6 And, more than all, a strangeness in the mind, A feeling that I was not for that hour, Nor for that place. But wherefore be cast down? For (not to speak of Reason and her pure Reflective acts to fix the moral law Deep in the conscience; nor of Christian Hope Bowing her head before her Sister Faith As one far mightier),7 hither I had come, Bear witness, Truth, endowed with holy powers And faculties, whether to work or feel. Oft when the dazzling shew no longer new Had ceased to dazzle, ofttimes did I quit My Comrades, leave the Crowd, buildings and groves, And as I paced alone the level fields Far from those lovely sights and sounds sublime With which I had been conversant, the mind Drooped not, but there into herself returning With prompt rebound, seemed fresh as heretofore. At least I more distinctly recognized Her native0 instincts; let me dare to speak A higher language, say that now I felt What independent solaces were mine To mitigate the injurious sway of place Or circumstance, how far soever changed In youth, or to be changed in manhood's prime; Or, for the few who shall be called to look On the long shadows, in our evening years, Ordained Precursors to the night of death. As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, I looked for universal things, perused The common countenance of earth and sky; Earth no where unembellished by some trace Of that first paradise whence man was driven; And sky whose beauty and bounty are expressed By the proud name she bears, the name of heaven. I called on both to teach me what they might; Or, turning the mind in upon herself, Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts And spread them with a wider creeping; felt


Incumbencies more awful,8 visitings Of the Upholder, of the tranquil Soul That tolerates the indignities of Time; And, from his centre of eternity All finite motions overruling, lives In glory immutable. But peace!�enough Here to record I had ascended now


6. Wordsworth was troubled by his family's expectation that his success at his studies would lead to his appointment as a fellow of St. John's College at the end of his degree. 7. This pious qualification, lines 83�87, was added by Wordsworth in late revisions of The Prelude. In the version of 1805, he wrote: "I was a chosen son. / For hither I had come with holy powers / And faculties, whether to work or feel."


8. I.e., the weight of more awe-inspiring moods.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 351


To such community with highest truth.


�A track pursuing, not untrod before,


From strict analogies by thought supplied,


Or consciousnesses not to be subdued,


no To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,


Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,


I gave a moral life; I saw them feel,


Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass


Lay bedded in a quickening0 soul, and all life-giving


135 That I beheld respired with inward meaning.


Add, that whate'er of Terror or of Love


Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on


From transitory passion, unto this


I was as sensitive as waters are


140 To the sky's influence: in a kindred mood


Of passion, was obedient as a lute


That waits upon the touches of the wind.9


Unknown, unthought of, yet I was most rich;


I had a world about me; 'twas my own,


145 I made it; for it only lived to me,


And to the God who sees into the heart.


Such sympathies, though rarely, were betrayed


By outward gestures and by visible looks:


Some called it madness�so, indeed, it was,


i5o If child-like fruitfulness in passing joy,


If steady moods of thoughtfulness, matured


To inspiration, sort with such a name;


If prophecy be madness; if things viewed


By Poets in old time, and higher up


155 By the first men, earth's first inhabitants,


May in these tutored days no more be seen


With undisordered sight. But, leaving this,


It was no madness: for the bodily eye


Amid my strongest workings evermore


160 Was searching out the lines of difference


As they lie hid in all external forms,


Near or remote, minute or vast, an eye


Which from a tree, a stone, a withered leaf,


To the broad ocean, and the azure heavens


165 Spangled with kindred multitudes of Stars,


Could find no surface where its power might sleep;


Which spake perpetual logic to my Soul,


And by an unrelenting agency


Did bind my feelings, even as in a chain.


170 And here, O friend! have I retraced my life


Up to an eminence,0 and told a tale high ground, hill


Of matters which not falsely may be called


The glory of my Youth. Of genius, power,


Creation, and Divinity itself,


175 I have been speaking, for my theme has been


What passed within me. Not of outward things


9. I.e., as an Eolian harp.


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35 2 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Done visibly for other minds; words, signs, Symbols, or actions, but of my own heart Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind.


180 O Heavens! how awful is the might of Souls And what they do within themselves, while yet The yoke of earth is new to them, the world Nothing but a wild field where they were sown. This is, in truth, heroic argument,


185 This genuine prowess, which I wished to touch With hand however weak,1 but in the main It lies far hidden from the reach of words. Points have we, all of us, within our Souls, Where all stand single: this I feel, and make


190 Breathings for incommunicable powers.2 But is not each a memory to himself? And, therefore, now that we must quit this theme, I am not heartless;0 for there's not a man disheartened


That lives who hath not known his god-like hours, 195 And feels not what an empire we inherit, As natural Beings, in the strength of Nature.


No more:�for now into a populous plain We must descend.�A Traveller I am Whose tale is only of himself; even so,


200 So be it, if the pure of heart be prompt To follow, and if Thou, O honored Friend! Who in these thoughts art ever at my side, Support, as heretofore, my fainting steps.3


From Book Fourth Summer Vacation1


[THE WALKS WITH HIS TERRIER. THE CIRCUIT OF THE LAKE]


Among the favorites whom it pleased me well To see again, was one, by ancient right


95 Our Inmate, a rough terrier of the hills, By birth and call of nature pre-ordained To hunt the badger, and unearth the fox, Among the impervious crags; but having been From youth our own adopted, he had passed


ioo Into a gentler service. And when first The boyish spirit flagged, and day by day Along my veins I kindled with the stir, The fermentation and the vernal0 heat springtime Of poesy, affecting2 private shades


1. An echo of Paradise Lost 9.28-29, where Milton declares his subject to be as suitable for "heroic argument" as was the warfare that traditionally had been represented in epics. 2. This obscure assertion may mean that he tries, inadequately, to express the inexpressible. 3. The terms of this request to Coleridge suggest the relation to Dante of Virgil, his guide in the


Inferno.


1. Wordsworth returned to Hawkshead for his first summer vacation in 1788. 2. "Affecting" in the sense of "preferring," but also suggesting a degree of affectation.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 35 3


105 Like a sick lover, then this Dog was used To watch me, an attendant and a friend Obsequious to my steps, early and late, Though often of such dilatory walk Tired, and uneasy at the halts I made,


no A hundred times when, roving high and low, I have been harrassed with the toil of verse, Much pains and little progress, and at once Some lovely Image in the Song rose up Full-formed, like Venus rising from the Sea;3


ii5 Then have I darted forwards and let loose My hand upon his back, with stormy joy; Caressing him again, and yet again. And when at evening on the public Way I sauntered, like a river murmuring


120 And talking to itself, when all things else Are still, the Creature trotted on before� Such was his custom; but whene'er he met


A passenger0 approaching, he would turn foot traveler To give me timely notice; and, straitway,


125 Grateful for that admonishment, I hushed My voice, composed my gait, and with the air And mien� of one whose thoughts are free, advanced look To give and take a greeting, that might save My name from piteous rumours, such as wait


bo On men suspected to be crazed in brain.


Those walks, well worthy to be prized and loved, Regretted! that word too was on my tongue, But they were richly laden with all good, And cannot be remembered but with thanks


135 And gratitude, and perfect joy of heart; Those walks, in all their freshness, now came back, Like a returning Spring. When first I made Once more the circuit of our little Lake, If ever happiness hath lodged with man,


no That day consummate0 happiness was mine, perfect Wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative. The sun was set, or setting, when I left Our cottage door, and evening soon brought on A sober hour,�not winning or serene,


145 For cold and raw the air was, and untuned: But as a face we love is sweetest then When sorrow damps it; or, whatever look It chance to wear, is sweetest if the heart Have fulness in herself, even so with me


150 It fared that evening. Gently did my Soul Put off her veil, and, self-transmuted, stood Naked, as in the presence of her God.4 While on I walked, a comfort seemed to touch


Venus, goddess of love, was born from the foam from Mount Sinai, he wore a veil to hide from the the sea. Israelites the shining of his face, but removed the


In Exodus 34.30-34, when Moses descended veil when, in privacy, he talked to God.


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35 4 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


A heart that had not been disconsolate;


155 Strength came where weakness was not known to be, At least not felt; and restoration came, Like an intruder, knocking at the door Of unacknowledged weariness. I took The balance, and with firm hand weighed myself.


160 �Of that external scene which round me lay Little, in this abstraction, did I see, Remembered less; but I had inward hopes And swellings of the Spirit: was rapt and soothed, Conversed with promises; had glimmering views


165 How life pervades the undecaying mind, How the immortal Soul with God-like power Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep5 That time can lay upon her; how on earth, Man, if he do but live within the light


170 Of high endeavours, daily spreads abroad His being armed with strength that cannot fail. Nor was there want of milder thoughts, of love, Of innocence, and holiday repose; And more than pastoral quiet 'mid the stir


175 Of boldest projects; and a peaceful end At last, or glorious, by endurance won. Thus musing, in a wood I sate me down, Alone, continuing there to muse; the slopes And heights, meanwhile, were slowly overspread


180 With darkness; and before a rippling breeze The long lake lengthened out its hoary� line: gray-white And in the sheltered coppice6 where I sate, Around me from among the hazel leaves* Now here, now there, moved by the straggling wind,


185 Came ever and anon a breath-like sound, Quick as the pantings of the faithful Dog, The off and on Companion of my walk; And such, at times, believing them to be, I turned my head, to look if he were there;


190 Then into solemn thought I passed once more.


[THE WALK HOME FROM THE DANCE. THE DISCHARGED SOLDIER]


* * * 'Mid a throng


310 Of Maids and Youths, old Men and Matrons staid, A medley of all tempers,7 I had passed The night in dancing, gaiety, and mirth; With din of instruments, and shuffling feet, And glancing forms, and tapers" glittering, candles


315 And unaimed prattle flying up and down Spirits upon the stretch, and here and there Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed, Whose transient pleasure mounted to the head,


5. "Informs" and "creates" are probably to be read 6. A clump of small trees and underbrush, as intransitive verbs, whereas "thaws" has "sleep" 7. Temperaments, types of character, for its direct object.


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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 355


And tingled through the veins. Ere we retired


320 The cock had crowed; and now the eastern sky Was kindling, not unseen from humble copse And open field through which the pathway wound That homeward led my steps. Magnificent The Morning rose, in memorable pomp,


325 Glorious as e'er I had beheld; in front The Sea lay laughing at a distance;�near, The solid mountains shone bright as the clouds, Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;8 And, in the meadows and the lower grounds,


330 Was all the sweetness of a common dawn; Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds; And Labourers going forth to till the fields.


Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim My heart was full: I made no vows, but vows


335 Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked In thankful blessedness which yet survives.


$ a $


370 Once, when those summer Months Were flown, and Autumn brought its annual shew Of oars with oars contending, sails with sails, Upon Winander's9 spacious breast, it chanced That�after I had left a flower-decked room


375 (Whose in-door pastime, lighted-up, survived To a late hour) and spirits overwrought1 Were making night do penance for a day Spent in a round of strenuous idleness� My homeward course led up a long ascent


380 Where the road's watery surface, to the top Of that sharp rising, glittered to the moon And bore the semblance of another stream Stealing with silent lapse2 to join the brook That murmured in the Vale. All else was still;


385 No living thing appeared in earth or air, And, save the flowing Water's peaceful voice, Sound was there none: but lo! an uncouth" shape strange Shewn by a sudden turning of the road, So near, that, slipping back into the shade 390 Of a thick hawthorn, I could mark him well, Myself unseen. He was of stature tall, A span3 above man's common measure tall.


8. Celestial light, referring to the universe's out-as an independent poem, which Wordsworth later ermost sphere, thought to be composed of fire. incorporated in The Prelude. "Grain-tinctured": as if dyed in the grain, dyed fast, 2. Flowing. Wordsworth is remembering a by the dawn light. description that his sister, Dorothy, had entered 9. Lake Windermere's. into her journal in January 1798, a few days before 1. Worked up to a high pitch. Wordsworth is he composed this passage: "The road to the village describing a party at which the "pastime" had been of Holford glittered like another stream." dancing. The description of the meeting with the 3. About nine inches (the distance between discharged soldier that follows was written in 1798 extended thumb and little finger).


.


35 6 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Stiff, lank, and upright;�a more meagre0 man emaciated Was never seen before by night or day.


Long were his arms, pallid his hands;�his mouth Looked ghastly0 in the moonlight. From behind, ghostly


A mile-stone propped him; I could also ken� see


That he was clothed in military garb,


Though faded, yet entire. Companionless,


No dog attending, by no staff sustained


He stood; and in his very dress appeared


A desolation, a simplicity


To which the trappings of a gaudy world


Make a strange background. From his lips erelong


Issued low muttered sounds, as if of pain


Or some uneasy thought; yet still his form


Kept the same awful steadiness;�at his feet


His shadow lay and moved not. From self-blame


Not wholly free, I watched him thus; at length


Subduing my heart's specious cowardice,4


I left the shady nook where I had stood,


And hailed him. Slowly, from his resting-place


He rose; and, with a lean and wasted arm


In measured gesture lifted to his head,


Returned my salutation: then resumed


His station as before; and when I asked


His history, the Veteran, in reply,


Was neither slow nor eager; but, unmoved,


And with a quiet uncomplaining voice,


A stately air of mild indifference,


He told, in few plain words, a Soldier's tale�


That in the Tropic Islands he had served,


Whence he had landed, scarcely three weeks past,


That on his landing he had been dismissed,5


And now was travelling towards his native home.


This heard, I said in pity, "Come with me."


He stooped, and straightway from the ground took up


An oaken staff, by me yet unobserved�


A staff which must have dropped from his slack hand


And lay till now neglected in the grass.


Though weak his step and cautious, he appeared


To travel without pain, and I beheld,


With an astonishment but ill suppressed,


His ghastly figure moving at my side;


Nor could I, while we journeyed thus, forbear


To turn from present hardships to the past,


And speak of war, battle, and pestilence,


Sprinkling this talk with questions, better spared,


On what he might himself have seen or felt.


He all the while was in demeanour calm,


4. I.e., he had been deceiving himself in thinking from the French and to quell slave rebellions. that the motive for his delay was not cowardice. Many contracted tropical diseases and died, or else 5. The Tropic Islands are the West Indies. During were rendered unfit for further service and dis- the 1790s tens of thousands of soldiers were sta-charged. tioned there to protect Britain's colonial holdings


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 357


Concise in answer; solemn and sublime He might have seemed, but that in all he said There was a strange half-absence, as of one Knowing too well the importance of his theme,


445 But feeling it no longer. Our discourse Soon ended, and together on we passed, In silence, through a wood, gloomy and still. Up-turning then along an open field, We reached a Cottage. At the door I knocked,


450 And earnestly to charitable care Commended him, as a poor friendless Man Belated, and by sickness overcome. Assured that now the Traveller would repose In comfort, I entreated, that henceforth


455 He would not linger in the public ways, But ask for timely furtherance0 and help, assistance Such as his state required.�At this reproof, With the same ghastly mildness in his look, He said, "My trust is in the God of Heaven,


460 And in the eye of him who passes me."


The Cottage door was speedily unbarred, And now the Soldier touched his hat once more With his lean hand; and, in a faltering voice Whose tone bespake reviving interests


465 Till then unfelt, he thanked me; I returned The farewell blessing of the patient Man, And so we parted. Back I cast a look, And lingered near the door a little space; Then sought with quiet heart my distant home.


From- Book Fifth Books


[THE DREAM OF THE ARAB]


45 * * 4 Oh! why hath not the Mind Some element to stamp her image on In nature somewhat nearer to her own? Why gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?1


50 One day, when from my lips a like complaint Had fallen in presence of a studious friend, He with a smile made answer that in truth 'Twas going far to seek disquietude, But, on the front of his reproof, confessed


55


That he himself had oftentimes given way To kindred hauntings. Whereupon I told That once in the stillness of a summer's noon, While I was seated in a rocky cave


1. Wordsworth is describing his recurrent fear that some holocaust might wipe out all books, the frail and perishable repositories of all human wisdom and poetry.


.


35 8 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


By the sea-side, perusing, so it chanced,


60 The famous history of the errant Knight Recovered by Cervantes,2 these same thoughts Beset me, and to height unusual rose, While listlessly I sate, and, having closed The Book, had turned my eyes tow'rd the wide Sea.


65 On Poetry, and geometric truth, And their high privilege of lasting life, From all internal injury exempt, I mused; upon these chiefly: and, at length, My senses yielding to the sultry air,


70 Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream. I saw before me stretched a boundless plain, Of sandy wilderness, all blank and void; And as I looked around, distress and fear Came creeping over me, when at my side,


75 Close at my side, an uncouth0 Shape appeared strange Upon a Dromedary,0 mounted high. camel He seemed an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes:3 A Lance he bore, and underneath one arm A Stone; and, in the opposite hand, a Shell


so Of a surpassing brightness. At the sight Much I rejoiced, not doubting but a Guide Was present, one who with unerring skill Would through the desert lead me; and while yet I looked, and looked, self-questioned what this freight


85 Which the New-comer carried through the Waste Could mean, the Arab told me that the Stone (To give it in the language of the Dream) Was Euclid's Elements;4 "and this," said he, "This other," pointing to the Shell, "this book


90 Is something of more worth": and, at the word, Stretched forth the Shell, so beautiful in shape, In color so resplendent, with command That I should hold it to my ear. I did so,� And heard, that instant, in an unknown tongue,


95 Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony� An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the Children of the Earth, By Deluge now at hand. No sooner ceased


ioo The Song than the Arab with calm look declared That all would come to pass, of which the voice Had given forewarning, and that he himself Was going then to bury those two Books: The One that held acquaintance with the stars,


105 And wedded Soul to Soul in purest bond


2. I.e., Don Quixote, the 17th-eentury novel about ded by a biographer. a man unable to distinguish between books' 3. Mathematics had flourished among the Arabs� romantic fictions and his own reality. In the 1805 hence the Arab rider. Prelude the dream vision that follows is that of the 4. Celebrated book on plane geometry and the friend mentioned in line 51. It is, in fact, closely theory of numbers by the Greek mathematician modeled on a dream actually dreamt by the 17 th-Euclid; it continued to be used as a textbook into century French philosopher Descartes and recor-the 19th century.


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 359


Of Reason, undisturbed by space or time: Th'other, that was a God, yea many Gods, Had voices more than all the winds, with power To exhilarate the Spirit, and to soothe,


no Through every clime, the heart of human kind. While this was uttering, strange as it may seem, I wondered not, although I plainly saw The One to be a Stone, the Other a Shell, Nor doubted once but that they both were Books;


115 Having a perfect faith in all that passed. Far stronger now grew the desire I felt To cleave unto this Man; but when I prayed To share his enterprize, he hurried on, Reckless0 of me: I followed, not unseen, heedless


120 For oftentimes he cast a backward look, Grasping his twofold treasure. Lance in rest, He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now He to my fancy had become the Knight Whose tale Cervantes tells; yet not the Knight,


125 But was an Arab of the desert, too, Of these was neither, and was both at once. His countenance, meanwhile, grew more disturbed, And looking backwards when he looked, mine eyes Saw, over half the wilderness diffused,


bo A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause. "It is," said he, "the waters of the Deep Gathering upon us"; quickening then the pace Of the unwieldy Creature he bestrode, He left me; I called after him aloud,�


135 He heeded not; but with his twofold charge Still in his grasp, before me, full in view, Went hurrying o'er the illimitable Waste With the fleet waters of a drowning World In chase of him; whereat I waked in terror;


140 And saw the Sea before me, and the Book, In which I had been reading, at my side.


[THE BOY OF WINANDER]


There was a Boy;5�ye knew him well, Ye Cliffs And Islands of Winander!�many a time At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills,


370 Rising or setting, would he stand alone, Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake; And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,


375 Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him.�And they would shout


5. In an early manuscript version of this passage, Wordsworth uses the first-person pronoun. The experience he describes was thus apparently his own.


.


36 0 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Across the watery Vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call,�with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud


380 Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din! and when a lengthened pause Of silence came, and baffled his best skill, Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize


385 Has carried far into his heart6 the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received


390 Into the bosom of the steady lake. This Boy was taken from his Mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Fair is the Spot, most beautiful the Vale Where he was born: the grassy Church-yard hangs 395 Upon a slope above the Village School; And through that Church-yard when my way has led On summer evenings, I believe that there A long half-hour together I have stood Mute�looking at the grave in which he lies! 400 Even now appears before the mind's clear eye That self-same Village Church; I see her sit (The throned Lady whom erewhile we hailed) On her green hill, forgetful of this Boy Who slumbers at her feet, forgetful, too, 405 Of all her silent neighbourhood of graves, And listening only to the gladsome sounds That, from the rural School ascending, play Beneath her, and about her. May she long Behold a race of Young Ones like to those 410 With whom I herded! (easily, indeed, We might have fed upon a fatter soil


Of Arts and Letters, but be that forgiven) A race of real children; not too wise, Too learned, or too good: but wanton,0 fresh, playful


415 And bandied up and down by love and hate; Not unresentful where self-justified; Fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy; Mad at their sports like withered leaves in winds: Though doing wrong and suffering, and full oft


420 Bending beneath our life's mysterious weight Of pain, and doubt, and fear; yet yielding not In happiness to the happiest upon earth. Simplicity in habit, truth in speech, Be these the daily strengtheners of their minds!


6. Thomas De Quincey responded to this line in capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets: "This has always struck me as with a flash of sublime very expression, 'far,' by which space and its infin- revelation." ities are attributed to the human heart, and to its


.


THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 361


425 May books and nature be their early joy! And knowledge, rightly honored with that name, Knowledge not purchased by the loss of power!


["THE MYSTERY OF WORDS"]


Here must we pause; this only let me add, From heart-experience, and in humblest sense Of modesty, that he, who, in his youth, A daily Wanderer among woods and fields,

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