[FG] "The 'dark dell' is perhaps Hardknot Ghyll. It is the only spot in this part of the valley which could be so described. A footpath which passes through the farmyard of Black Hall runs alongside this ghyll and joins the Duddon Valley with the Whitehaven Road. The 'blue streamlet' would then perhaps be the little tributary which flows down the length of the ghyll over a slaty bed to join the Duddon below; or perhaps Wordsworth was mentally addressing the Duddon itself, though from the interior of the ghyll he would not be able to see it.
The alternative view is that by the 'dark dell' no particular spot is indicated but the whole of the upper valley of the Duddon, which is of a savage and forbidding aspect, and quite of a character to have inspired the sonnet. It is almost treeless, and the ground on either side of the stream is covered with bracken and loose blocks of slate, while the fells rise steeply on either hand, and are capped by naked crags.
As to the epithet 'blue' (line 10), the cerulean colour of the Duddon is one of its most exquisite characteristics, and is due, as Wordsworth has himself[FH] explained, to the hue of the rocks and gravel seen through the 'perfectly pellucid' water." (Herbert Rix.)
"This sonnet puzzles me from the use of the words dark dell. I could find nothing at all hereabout that could possibly be described so, until I looked back at the rain-black solitudes north of Cockley Beck, and imagined the poet using the word dark in the sense of mysterious, when I can imagine he would have been helped to this thought of hideous usages, and rites accursed, by the large Druid-like-looking boulders, and the mounds of burial, suggested by the moraine-heaps in the neighbourhood. But I think the 'blue Streamlet' must have been suggested by the light blue grey colour of the slate pebbles over which Duddon slides so easily here." (H. D. Rawnsley.)
[FH] See his Guide to the Lakes. Fifth edition. Kendal, 1835, p. 27.—Ed.
IX
THE STEPPING-STONES
The struggling Rill insensibly is grown
Into a Brook of loud and stately march,