But by pointing out his faults, his critics did him and us a service; and it was one by which the poet profited, as we have seen, in spite of his independence.
Let us now look at some of Wordsworth's multiple readings, if we may call them so—passages, namely, in which he has returned, year after year, to certain peccant verses, changing them again and again in the quest of adequate expression. After repeated experiments he sometimes finds a reading to please himself; sometimes, having allowed a provisional text to stand throughout many years, he discards it and returns to the original form; and sometimes, again, he abandons a passage entirely, after scarring it with a lifetime's emendations. Of the first sort I will cite three readings of a stanza in "A Poet's Epitaph." As first published in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, the poem contained this adjuration to the philosopher "wrapped in his sensual fleece"
O turn aside, and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy pin-point of a soul away!
Lamb did not like this; and he wrote to Wordsworth: "The 'Poet's Epitaph' is disfigured, to my taste, by the coarse epithet of 'pin-point' in the sixth stanza." In the edition of 1815 the "coarse epithet" disappears, and the passage is modified as follows:
——Take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, That abject thing, thy soul, away!
The years that "bring the philosophic mind" did not, however, reconcile Wordsworth with the particular "philosopher" here in question. (Sir Humphrey Davy, as Crabb Robinson, if I am not mistaken, tells us). On the contrary, the poet devised a still more injurious epithet for that unhappy physicist; and the passage now reads:
——Take, I pray,... Thy ever-dwindling soul away!
Another of these multiple corrections has attracted much notice; it occurs in the successive descriptions of the craft wherein the "Blind Highland Boy" went sailing. In the first edition of that poem Wordsworth called it
A Household Tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes!
It would seem difficult to defend this couplet upon any accepted theory of aesthetics, rhyme, or syntax; and the "Household Tub" provoked quite naturally a shout of derision from all the critics; it became the poetical scandal of the day. Jeffery, mindful of "the established laws" of poetic art, protested that there was nothing, down to the wiping of shoes, or the evisceration of chickens, which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated. The tub, in short, proved intolerable to the reviewers; and when next the poem appeared in a new edition, that of 1815, Wordsworth transmuted the craft into a green turtle shell, noting the change as made "upon the suggestion of a Friend ":