A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770–1850)

1. His Life. Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, a town which is actually outside the Lake District, but well within hail of it. His father, who was a lawyer, died when William was thirteen years old. The elder Wordsworth left a modest sum of money, which was not available at the time of his death, so that William had to depend on the generosity of two uncles, who paid for his schooling at Hawkshead, near Lake Windermere. Subsequently Wordsworth went to Cambridge, entering St. John’s College in 1787. His work at the university was quite undistinguished, and having graduated in 1791 he left with no fixed career in view. After spending a few months in London he crossed over to France (1791), and stayed at Orléans and Blois for nearly a year. An enthusiasm for the Revolution was aroused in him; he himself has chronicled the mood in one of his happiest passages:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.

He returned to Paris in 1792 just after the September massacres, and the sights and stories that greeted him there shook his faith in the dominant political doctrine. Even yet, however, he thought of becoming a Girondin, or moderate Republican, but his allowance from home was stopped, and he returned to England. With his sister Dorothy (henceforward his lifelong companion) he settled in a little cottage in Dorset; then, having met Coleridge, they moved to Alfoxden, a house in Somersetshire, in order to live near him. It was there that the two poets took the series of walks the fruit of which was to be the Lyrical Ballads.

After a visit to Germany in 1798 the Wordsworths settled in the Lake District, which was to be their home for the future. In turn they occupied Dove Cottage, at Town-End, Grasmere (1802), Allan Bank (1808), Grasmere Parsonage (1811), and lastly the well-known residence of Rydal Mount, which was Wordsworth’s home from 1813 till his death. Shortly after he had moved to Rydal Mount he received the sinecure of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and was put out of reach of poverty.

The remainder of his life was a model of domesticity. He was carefully tended by his wife and sister, who, with a zeal that was noteworthy, though it was injudicious, treasured every scrap of his poetry that they could lay their hands on. His great passion was for traveling. He explored most of the accessible parts of the Continent, and visited Scotland several times. On the last occasion (1831) he and his daughter renewed their acquaintance with Scott at Abbotsford, and saw the great novelist when he was fast crumbling into mental ruin. Wordsworth’s poetry, which at first had been received with derision or indifference, was now winning its way, and recognition was general. In 1839 Oxford conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L.; in 1842 the Crown awarded him a pension of £300 a year; and on the death of Southey in 1843 he became Poet Laureate.

Long before this time he had discarded his early ideals and become the upholder of conservatism. Perhaps he is not “the lost leader” whose recantation Browning bewails with rather theatrical woe; but he lived to deplore the Reform Bill and to oppose the causes to which his early genius had been dedicated. Throughout his life, however, he never wavered in his faith in himself and his immortality as a poet. He lived to see his own belief in his powers triumphantly justified. It is seldom indeed that such gigantic egoism is so amply and so justly repaid.

2. His Poetry. He records that his earliest verses were written at school, and that they were “a tame imitation of Pope’s versification.” This is an interesting admission of the still surviving domination of the earlier poet. At the university he composed some poetry, which appeared as The Evening Walk (1793) and Descriptive Sketches (1793). In style these poems have little originality, but they already show the Wordsworthian eye for nature. The firstfruits of his genius were seen in the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a joint production by Coleridge and himself, which was published at Bristol.

Regarding the inception of this remarkable book both Wordsworth and Coleridge have left accounts, which vary to some extent, though not materially. Coleridge’s may be taken as the more plausible. He says in his Biographia Literaria:

It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr Wordsworth was to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday life by awakening the mind’s attention to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us.

This volume is epoch-making, for it is the prelude to the Romantic movement proper. Wordsworth had the larger share in the book. Some of his poems in it, such as The Thorn and The Idiot Boy, are condemned as being trivial and childish in style; a few, such as Simon Lee and Expostulation and Reply, are more adequate in their expression; and the concluding piece, Tintern Abbey, is one of the triumphs of his genius.

During his visit to Germany in 1798–99 Wordsworth composed such typical poems as Lucy Gray, Ruth, and Nutting, which along with a large number of the same kind were issued in two volumes in 1807. This work, which comprises the flower of his poetry, was sharply assailed by the critics; but on the whole it amended the puerilities of the earlier volume, and set in motion the steady undercurrent of appreciation that was finally to overwhelm his detractors. While he was in Germany he planned The Prelude, which was not concluded till 1805, and remained unpublished during his lifetime. The Prelude, which dealt with his education and early ideals, was meant to be the introduction to an enormous blank-verse poem, chiefly on himself. The entire work was to be called The Recluse, and The Excursion (1814) was the second and only other completed part of it. It is on the whole fortunate that the entire poem was never finished. The Excursion is in itself a huge poem of nine books, and long stretches of it are dull and prosaic. It is inferior to The Prelude, which, though it is unequal in style, has some of the very best Wordsworthian blank verse; and it is only reasonable to imagine that further instalments of The Recluse would mark an increasing decline in poetic merit.

After the publication of The Excursion Wordsworth’s poetical power was clearly on the wane, but his productivity was unimpaired. His later volumes include The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), The Waggoner (1819), Peter Bell (1819), Yarrow Revisited (1835), and The Borderers (1842), a drama. The progress of the works marks the decline in an increasing degree. There are flashes of the old spirit, such as we see in his lines upon the death of “the Ettrick Shepherd”; but the fire and stately intonation become rarer, and mere garrulity becomes more and more apparent.

3. His Theory of Poetry. In the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth set out his theory of poetry, and to this theory he continued to do lip-service, while in practice he constantly violated it. The Wordsworthian dogma can be divided into two portions, concerning (a) the subject and (b) the style of poetry.

(a) Regarding subject, Wordsworth declares his preference for “incidents and situations from common life”; to obtain such situations “humble and rustic life is generally chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil.” In this respect Wordsworth was staunch to his declared opinions, because the majority of his poems deal with humble and rustic. life, including his own.

(b) With regard to style, Wordsworth declares that the language of poetry ought to be “the language really used by men,” especially by rustics, because the latter “speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” A little reflection will show that this contention is at best only half true, and Wordsworth laid himself open to deadly criticism. It was this part of his theory, moreover, that he himself constantly violated. Coleridge, who was Wordsworth’s great friend, but who held his critical faith higher than personal predilection, had but to quote Wordsworth’s own poems to condemn him. No doubt Wordsworth in such pieces as Lucy Gray and We are Seven does use the language of ordinary men; but in his greatest poems he prefers a language of a certain stiff ornateness, fired and fused by the passion of his imaginative insight. As Coleridge pointed out, it is not likely that a rustic would say

The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion.

Yet this expression is typical of Wordsworth’s style at its best.

4. Features of his Poetry. (a) Its Inequality and its Limitations. All the critics of Wordsworth are at pains to point out the mass of inferior work that came from his pen. Matthew Arnold, one of the acutest of the poet’s admirers, closes the record of Wordsworth’s best work with the year 1808, even before the composition of The Excursion. This poem is long, meditative, and often prosaic, and these tendencies become more marked as the years pass. Before the year 1808 he had produced poems as intensely and artistically beautiful as any in the language. It was hard, however, for Wordsworth to appreciate his limitations, which were many and serious. He had little sense of humor, a scanty dramatic power, and only a meager narrative gift, but he strove to exploit all these qualities in his work. His one drama, The Borderers, was only a partial success, and his narrative poems, like Ruth and The White Doe of Rylstone, are not among the best of his work.

(b) Its Egoism. In a person of lesser caliber such a degree of self-esteem as Wordsworth’s would have been ridiculous; in his case, with the undoubted genius that was in the man, it was something almost heroic. Domestic circumstances—the adoration of a couple of women and the cloistral seclusion of the life he led—confirmed him in the habit of taking himself too seriously. The best of his shorter poems deal with his own experiences; and his longest works, The Prelude and The Excursion, describe his career, both inward and outward, with a fullness, closeness, and laborious anxiety that are unique in our literature.

(c) In spite of this self-obsession he is curiously deficient in the purely lyrical gift. He cannot bare his bosom, as Burns does; he cannot leap into the ether like Shelley. Yet he excels, especially in the face of nature, in the expression of a reflective and analytic mood which is both personal and general. The following lyric illustrates this mood to perfection:

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;

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.

Sometimes he does touch on intimate emotions, but then he tends to be diffident and decorous, hinting at rather than proclaiming the passions that he feels. The series of Lucy poems are typical of their kind:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise,

And very few to love.

*****

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

Such a lyrical gift, reflective rather than passionate, finds a congenial mode of expression in the sonnet, the most complicated and expository of the lyrical forms. In his sonnets his lyrical mood burns clear and strong, and as a result they rank among the best in English poetry.

(d) His Treatment of Nature. His dealings with nature are his chief glory as a poet.

(1) His treatment is accurate and first-hand. As he explained, he wrote with his eye “steadily fixed on the object.” Even the slightest of his poems have evidence of close observation:

The cattle are grazing,

Their heads never raising;

There are forty feeding like one.

The most polished of his poems have the same stamp, as can be seen in Resolution and Independence. “The image of the hare,” he says with reference to this poem, quoted below, “I then observed on the ridge of the Fell.”

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;

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.

All things that love the sun are out of doors;

The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;

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.

(2) This personal dealing with Nature in all her moods produces a joy, a plenteousness of delight, that to most readers is Wordsworth’s most appealing charm. Before the beauty of nature he is never paltry; he is nearly always adequate; and that is perhaps the highest achievement that he ever desired. The extracts just quoted are outstanding examples of this aspect of his poetry.

(3) In his treatment of nature, however, he is not content merely to rejoice: he tries to see more deeply and to find the secret springs of this joy and thanksgiving. He says:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

He strives to capture and embody in words such deep-seated emotions, but, almost of necessity, from the very nature of the case, with little success. He gropes in the shadows, and comes away with empty hands. He cannot solve the riddle of

those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings.

Yet, with a remarkable fusion of sustained thought and of poetic imagination, he does convey the idea of “the Being that is in the clouds and air,” the soul that penetrates all things, the spirit, the mystical essence, the divine knowledge that, as far as he was concerned, lies behind all nature. Lastly, in one of the most exalted poetical efforts in any language, he puts into words the idea of the continuity of life that runs through all existence:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

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

From God, who is our home.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

(e) In style Wordsworth presents a remarkable contrast, for he ranges from the sublime (as in the extract last quoted) to the ridiculous:

In the sweet shire of Cardigan,

Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,

An old Man dwells, a little man,—

’Tis said he once was tall.

Full five-and-thirty years he lived

A running huntsman merry;

And still the centre of his cheek

Is red as a ripe cherry.

Simon Lee

This verse illustrates the lower ranges of his style, when he is hag-ridden with his theories of poetic diction. The first two lines are mediocre; the second pair are absurd; and the rest of the verse is middling. This is simplicity overdone; yet it is always to be remembered that at his best Wordsworth can unite simplicity with sublimity, as he does in the lyrics we have already quoted. He has a kind of middle style; at its best it has grace and dignity, a heart-searching simplicity, and a certain magical enlightenment of phrase that is all his own. Not Shakespeare himself can better Wordsworth when the latter is in a mood that produces a poem like the following:

“She shall be sportive as the fawn

That wild with glee across the lawn,

Or up the mountain springs;

And hers shall be the breathing balm,

And hers the silence and the calm,

Of mute insensate things.

“The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the Storm

Grace that shall mould the Maiden’s form

By silent sympathy.

“The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.”

The Education of Nature