This mood of mind Wordsworth appreciated as fully as the opposite, or complementary one, which finds expression in the great Ode, Intimations of Immortality (vol. viii.), l. 26.
'No more shall grief of mine the season wrong,'
and which Browning expresses in other verses of his lyric, and repeatedly elsewhere. The allusion in the last stanza of this poem is to Wordsworth's sister Dorothy.—Ed.
[Contents: Poems on the Naming of Places]
[Main Contents]
The Childless Father
Composed 1800.-Published 1800[A]
[Written at Town-end, Grasmere. When I was a child at Cockermouth, no funeral took place without a basin filled with sprigs of boxwood being placed upon a table covered with a white cloth in front of the house. The huntings on foot, in which the old man is supposed to join as here described, were of common, almost habitual, occurrence in our vales when I was a boy, and the people took much delight in them. They are now less frequent.—I. F.]
One of the "Poems founded on the Affections."—Ed.