FOOTNOTES:
[41] In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some village festival where he had danced all night:
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
A dedicated Spirit.—Book IV.
[42] Prelude, Book II.
I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures.
Idiot Boy (1798).
[44] Prelude, Book III.
[45] Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a still earlier date.
[46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:
While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.
And in The Italian Itinerant and The Swiss Goatherd we find a thermometer or barometer called
The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime.
Still worse in the Eclipse of the Sun, 1821:
High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening.
So in The Excursion,
The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions.
[47] Prelude, Book VI.
[48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,—a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. Compare:
Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succour me!
O, think ye not my heart was sair
When my love dropt down and spake na mair?
Compare this with,—
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.
[51] In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.
[52] In Resolution and Independence.
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