Young Wordsworth

Wordsworth's



Poetical Works

volume 3




edited by

William Knight



1896

Table of Contents

• 1804
• 1805
• • The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind
  • From the Italian of Michael Angelo
• Appendices

Crummock Water

Table of Contents

• 1804
• • "She was a Phantom of delight"
  • "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
  • The Affliction of Margaret—
  • The Forsaken
  • Repentance
  • Address to my Infant Daughter, Dora
  • The Kitten and Falling Leaves
  • The Small Celandine
  • At Applethwaite, near Keswick
  • Vaudracour and Julia

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1804

The poems written in 1804 were not numerous; and, with the exception of The Small Celandine, the stanzas beginning "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and "She was a Phantom of delight," they were less remarkable than those of the two preceding, and the three following years. Wordsworth's poetical activity in 1804 is not recorded, however, in Lyrical Ballads or Sonnets, but in The Prelude, much of which was thought out, and afterwards dictated to Dorothy or Mary Wordsworth, on the terrace walk of Lancrigg during that year; while the Ode, Intimations of Immortality was altered and added to, although it did not receive its final form till 1806. In the sixth book of The Prelude, p. 222, the lines occur: '

Four years and thirty, told this very week,
Have I been now a sojourner on earth.'

That part of the great autobiographical poem must therefore have been composed in April, 1804.—Ed.

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"She was a Phantom of delight,"

The Poem

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere. The germ of this poem was four lines composed as a part of the verses on the Highland Girl. Though beginning in this way, it was written from my heart, as is sufficiently obvious.—I. F.]

One of the "Poems of the Imagination."—Ed.

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Footnote A:   Compare two references to Mary Wordsworth in The Prelude:

'Another maid there was, who also shed
A gladness o'er that season, then to me,
By her exulting outside look of youth
And placid under-countenance, first endeared;'

(Book vi, l. 224).

'She came, no more a phantom to adorn
A moment, but an inmate of the heart,
And yet a spirit, there for me enshrined
To penetrate the lofty and the low;'

(Book xiv, l. 268).—Ed.
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Footnote B:   The poet expressly told me that these verses were on his wife.—H. C. R.
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Note:   It is not easy to say what were the "four lines composed as a part of the verses on the Highland Girl" which the Fenwick note tells us was "the germ of this poem." They may be lines now incorporated in those To a Highland Girl, vol. ii. p. 389, or they may be lines in the present poem, which Wordsworth wrote at first for the Highland Girl, but afterwards transferred to this one. They may have been the first four lines of the later poem. The two should be read consecutively, and compared.

After Wordsworth's death, a writer in the Daily News, January 1859—then understood to be Miss Harriet Martineau —wrote thus:

"May 12 (1842).—Wordsworth said that the poems 'Our walk was far among the ancient trees' [vol. ii. p. 167], then 'She was a Phantom of delight,'^B and finally the two sonnets To a Painter, should be read in succession as exhibiting the different phases of his affection to his wife."

(Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, vol. iii. p. 197.)

The use of the word "machine," in the third stanza of the poem, has been much criticised, but for a similar use of the term, see the sequel to The Waggoner (p. 107):

'Forgive me, then; for I had been
On friendly terms with this Machine.'

See also Hamlet (act II. scene ii. l. 124):

'Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him.'

The progress of mechanical industry in Britain since the beginning of the present century has given a more limited, and purely technical, meaning to the word, than it bore when Wordsworth used it in these two instances.—Ed.

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"I wandered lonely as a cloud"

The Poem

[Town-end, 1804. The two best lines in it are by Mary. The daffodils grew, and still grow, on the margin of Ullswater, and probably may be seen to this day as beautiful in the month of March, nodding their golden heads beside the dancing and foaming waves.—I.F.]

This was No. VII. in the series of Poems, entitled, in the edition of 1807, "Moods of my own Mind." In 1815, and afterwards, it was classed by Wordsworth among his "Poems of the Imagination."—Ed.

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Footnote A:   It was The Reverie of Poor Susan.—Ed.
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Footnote B:   This is an error in the original printed text. Evidently a year before the above-mentioned publication in 1815: one of 1810-1815. text Ed.
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Note:   The following is from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, under date, Thursday, April 15, 1802:

In the edition of 1815 there is a footnote to the lines

'They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude'

to the following effect:

"The subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it. The one which follows^A is strictly a Reverie; and neither that, nor the next after it in succession, Power of Music, would have been placed here except for the reason given in the foregoing note."

The being "placed here" refers to its being included among the "Poems of the Imagination." The "foregoing note" is the note appended to 'The Horn of Egremont Castle'; and the "reason given" in it is "to avoid a needless multiplication of the Classes" into which Wordsworth divided his poems. This note of 181?^B, is reprinted mainly to show the difficulties to which Wordsworth was reduced by the artificial method of arrangement referred to. The following letter to Mr. Wrangham is a more appropriate illustration of the poem of "The Daffodils." It was written, the late Bishop of Lincoln says, "sometime afterwards." (See Memoirs of Wordsworth, vol. i. pp. 183, 184); and, for the whole of the letter, see a subsequent volume of this edition.

"Grasmere, Nov. 4.

"My Dear Wrangham,—I am indeed much pleased that Mrs. Wrangham and yourself have been gratified by these breathings of simple nature. You mention Butler, Montagu's friend; not Tom Butler, but the conveyancer: when I was in town in spring, he happened to see the volumes lying on Montagu's mantelpiece, and to glance his eye upon the very poem of The Daffodils. 'Aye,' says he, 'a fine morsel this for the Reviewers.' When this was told me (for I was not present) I observed that there were 'two lines' in that little poem which, if thoroughly felt, would annihilate nine-tenths of the reviews of the kingdom, as they would find no readers. The lines I alluded to were these:

'They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.'"

These two lines were composed by Mrs. Wordsworth. In 1877 the daffodils were still growing in abundance on the shore of Ullswater, below Gowbarrow Park.

Compare the last four lines of James Montgomery's poem, The Little Cloud:

'Bliss in possession will not last:
Remembered joys are never past:
At once the fountain, stream, and sea,
They were—they are—they yet shall be.'

Ed.

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The Affliction of Margaret—^A

Composed 1804.—Published 1807

The Poem

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere. This was taken from the case of a poor widow who lived in the town of Penrith. Her sorrow was well known to Mrs. Wordsworth, to my sister, and, I believe, to the whole town. She kept a shop, and when she saw a stranger passing by, she was in the habit of going out into the street to enquire of him after her son.—I.F.]

Included by Wordsworth among his "Poems founded on the Affections."—Ed.

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Footnote A:  In the edition of 1807, the title was The Affliction of Margaret—of—; in 1820, it was The Affliction of Margaret; and in 1845, it was as above. In an early MS. it was The Affliction of Mary—of—. For an as yet unpublished Preface to it, see volume viii. of this edition.—Ed.
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The Forsaken

The Poem

[This was an overflow from 'The Affliction of Margaret', and was excluded as superfluous there, but preserved in the faint hope that it may turn to account by restoring a shy lover to some forsaken damsel. My poetry has been complained of as deficient in interests of this sort,—a charge which the piece beginning, "Lyre! though such power do in thy magic live," will scarcely tend to obviate. The natural imagery of these verses was supplied by frequent, I might say intense, observation of the Rydal torrent. What an animating contrast is the ever-changing aspect of that, and indeed of every one of our mountain brooks, to the monotonous tone and unmitigated fury of such streams among the Alps as are fed all the summer long by glaciers and melting snows. A traveller observing the exquisite purity of the great rivers, such as the Rhone at Geneva, and the Reuss at Lucerne, when they issue out of their respective lakes, might fancy for a moment that some power in nature produced this beautiful change, with a view to make amends for those Alpine sullyings which the waters exhibit near their fountain heads; but, alas! how soon does that purity depart before the influx of tributary waters that have flowed through cultivated plains and the crowded abodes of men.—I. F.]

Included by Wordsworth among his "Poems founded on the Affections."—Ed.

Repentance

The Poem

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere. Suggested by the conversation of our next neighbour, Margaret Ashburner.—I. F.]

This "next neighbour" is constantly referred to in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal.

Included in 1820 among the "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection"; in 1827, and afterwards, it was classed with those "founded on the Affections."—Ed.

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Address to my Infant Daughter, Dora^A

On Being Reminded that She was a Month Old that Day, September 16

Composed September 16, 1804.—Published 1815

Included by Wordsworth among his "Poems of the Fancy."—Ed.

The Poem

Footnote A:   The title from 1815 to 1845 was Address to my Infant Daughter, on being reminded that she was a Month old, on that Day. After her death in 1847, her name was added to the title.—Ed.
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Footnote B:  See Dryden's poem, To the pious memory of the accomplished young lady, Mrs. Anne Killigrew, I. l. 15.—Ed.
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Note:   The text of this poem was never altered.—Ed.

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Main Contents

The Kitten and Falling Leaves^A

Composed 1804.—Published 1807

The Poem

[Seen at Town-end, Grasmere. The elder-bush has long since disappeared; it hung over the wall near the cottage: and the kitten continued to leap up, catching the leaves as here described. The Infant was Dora.—I. F.]

One of the "Poems of the Fancy." In Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary, etc., under date Sept. 10, 1816, we find,

"He" (Wordsworth) "quoted from 'The Kitten and the Falling Leaves' to show he had connected even the kitten with the great, awful, and mysterious powers of Nature."

Ed.

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