Note:
"March 26, 1802.—While I was getting into bed he" (W.) "wrote The Rainbow."
"May 14th.— ... William very nervous. After he was in bed, haunted with altering The Rainbow."
(Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal.) This poem was known familiarly in the household as "The Rainbow," although not printed under that title. The text was never changed.
In The Friend, vol. i. p. 58 (ed. 1818), Coleridge writes:
"Men laugh at the falsehoods imposed on them during their childhood, because they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the past in the present, and so to produce that continuity in their self-consciousness, which Nature has made the law of their animal life. Men are ungrateful to others, only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments."
He then quotes the above poem, and adds:
"I am informed that these lines have been cited as a specimen of despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer; not willingly in his presence would I behold the sun setting behind our mountains.... But let the dead bury their dead! The poet sang for the living.... I was always pleased with the motto placed under the figure of the rosemary in old herbals:
'Sus, apage! Haud tibi spiro.'"
'Sus, apage! Haud tibi spiro.'"
Compare the passage in The Excursion (book ix. l. 36) beginning:
'... Ah! why in age
Do we revert so fondly, etc.'
also that in The Prelude (book v. l. 507) beginning: