Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling,
And, starting up, to Bruce’s heart
He launched a deadly javelin:
Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, stepping forth to meet the same,
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.
And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon) sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
Against the Moorish Crescent.
These are surely the versos of an attorney’s clerk ‘penning a stanza when he should engross’. It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had he written
And Gordon never gave a hint,
But, having somewhat picked his flint,
Let fly the fatal bullet
That killed that lovely pullet,
it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: ‘The poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connexion, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.’ Here is an indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney’s clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge’s most truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed 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.
Prelude, Book IV.
[50] His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of ‘those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream’ (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C., vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:
The singing masons building roofs of gold.
This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers’ (Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography). Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, ‘My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease.’ One cannot help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.