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;