The Poem
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I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile! 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. 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; 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, 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; 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. A Picture had it been of lasting ease, Elysian quiet, without toil or strife; No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, 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: A power is gone, which nothing can restore; A deep distress hath humanised my Soul. 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; 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, This work of thine I blame not, but commend; This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. 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, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, 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! 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.— Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. [Note] [Contents 1805] [Main Contents] | [1] [2] [3] [4] | 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 |
| 1807 | |
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and add a gleam, The lustre, known to neither sea nor land, But borrowed from the youthful Poet's dream; | 1820 |
| ... the gleam, ... | 1827 |
and add a gleam,
The lustre, known to neither sea nor land,
But borrowed from the youthful Poet's dream;
... the gleam, ...
The edition of 1832 returns to the text of 1807.[a]
[return]
[Variant 2:]
| 1845 | |
| ... a treasure-house, a mine | 1807 |
... a treasure-house, a mine
The whole of this stanza was omitted in the editions of 1820-1843.
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[Variant 3:]
| 1815 | |
| ... delusion ... | 1807 |
... delusion ...
| 1837 | |
| A faith, a trust, that could not be betray'd. | 1807 |
A faith, a trust, that could not be betray'd.
[Footnote A:] The original title, in MS, was Verses suggested, etc,—Ed.
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[Footnote B:] Miss Arnold wrote to me, in December 1893:
"I have never doubted that the Peele Castle of Wordsworth is the Piel off Walney Island. I know that my brother Matthew so believed, and I went with him some years ago from Furness Abbey over to Piel, visiting it as the subject of the picture and the poem."
Ed.
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[Sub-Footnote a:] Many years ago Principal Shairp wrote to me,
"Have you noted how the two lines, 'The light that never was,' etc., stood in the edition of 1827? I know no other such instance of a change from commonplace to perfection of ideality."
The Principal had not remembered at the time that the "perfection of ideality" was in the original edition of 1807. The curious thing is that the prosaic version of 1820 and 1827 ever took its place. Wordsworth's return to his original reading was one of the wisest changes he introduced into the text of 1832.—Ed.
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Note: There is a Peele Castle, on a small rocky island, close to the town of Peele, in the Isle of Man; yet separated from it, much as St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall is separated from the mainland. This castle was believed by many to be the one which Sir George painted, and which gave rise to the foregoing lines. I visited it in 1879, being then ignorant that any other Peele Castle existed; and although, the day being calm, and the season summer, I thought Sir George had idealized his subject much—(as I had just left Coleorton, where the picture still exists)—I accepted the customary opinion. [But] I am now convinced, both from the testimony of the Arnold family[B], and as the result of a visit to Piel Castle, near Barrow in Furness, that Wordsworth refers to it. The late Bishop of Lincoln, in his uncle's Memoirs (vol. i. p. 299), quotes the line
"I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged pile,"
and adds,
"He had spent four weeks there of a college summer vacation at the house of his cousin, Mr. Barker."
This house was at Rampside, the village opposite Piel, on the coast of Lancashire. The "rugged pile," too, now "cased in the unfeeling armour of old time," painted by Beaumont, is obviously this Piel Castle near Barrow. I took the engraving of his picture with me, when visiting it: and although Sir George—after the manner of landscape artists of his day—took many liberties with his subjects, it is apparent that it was this, and not Peele Castle in Mona, that he painted. The "four summer weeks" referred to in the first stanza, were those spent at Piel during the year 1794.
With the last verse of these Elegiac Stanzas compare stanzas ten and eleven of the Ode, Intimations of Immortality, vol. viii.
One of the two pictures of "Peele Castle in a Storm"—engraved by S. W. Reynolds, and published in the editions of Wordsworth's poems of 1815 and 1820—is still in the Beaumont Gallery at Coleorton Hall.
The poem is so memorable that I have arranged to make this picture of "Peele Castle in a Storm," the vignette to vol. xv. of this edition. It deserves to be noted that it was to the pleading of Barron Field that we owe the restoration of the original line of 1807,
'The light that never was, on sea or land.'
An interesting account of Piel Castle will be found in Hearne and Byrne's Antiquities. It was built by the Abbot of Furness in the first year of the reign of Edward III.—Ed.
[Contents 1805]
[Main Contents]
Elegiac Verses
In Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth, Commander of the E. I. Company's Ship, The Earl Of Abergavenny, in which He Perished by Calamitous Shipwreck, Feb. 6th, 1805.
Composed 1805.—Published 1842
[The Poem]
Composed near the Mountain track, that leads from Grasmere through Grisdale Hawes, where it descends towards Patterdale.
["Here did we stop; and here looked round, While each into himself descends."
The point is two or three yards below the outlet of Grisedale Tarn, on a foot-road by which a horse may pass to Patterdale— a ridge of Helvellyn on the left, and the summit of Fairfield on the right.—I. F.]
This poem was included among the "Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces."—Ed.