Oxford Lectures on Poetry

by A. C. Bradley

magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the Prelude) of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many passages which show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in ‘Arabian fiction.’ The ‘Arabian sands’ (Solitary Reaper) had the same glamour for him as for others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (Prelude, v.) has a very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance in excelsis, like Kubla Khan. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,

Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace;

the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he praises the Osmunda fern as

lovelier, in its own retired abode On Grasmere’s beach, than Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,[8]

—these, and a score of other passages, all point the same way. He would not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron, nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his purpose, as in Ruth, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:

He told of the magnolia, spread High as a cloud, high overhead, The cypress and her spire; Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam Cover a hundred leagues, and seem To set the hills on fire.

He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he wrote of Greek religion in the Excursion is full of imagination and brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth’s pen:

Great God! I’d rather be 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 Triton blow his wreathed horn.