THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
VOL. VI

THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

EDITED BY

WILLIAM KNIGHT

VOL. VI

London

MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896

CONTENTS

1814

1815

1816

1817

1818

1819

1820

WORDSWORTH'S POETICAL WORKS
1814

The Excursion—to which the fifth volume of this edition is devoted—has been assigned to the year 1814; since it was finished, and first published, in that year,—although commenced in 1795. During the earlier stages of its composition, this poem was known, in the Wordsworth household, as "The Pedlar"; and Dorothy Wordsworth tells us in one of her letters to the Beaumonts, preserved amongst the Coleorton MSS., that "The Pedlar" was finished at Christmas 1804. See also the Memoirs of Wordsworth, by his nephew (vol. i. p. 304, etc.), and Dorothy's Grasmere Journal, passim. But The Excursion, as we have it now, was finished for press in 1814. The poems more immediately belonging to that year are Laodamia, the Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, Dion, and two Sonnets.—Ed.

LAODAMIA

Composed 1814.—Published 1815.

[Written at Rydal Mount. The incident of the trees growing and withering put the subject into my thoughts, and I wrote with the hope of giving it a loftier tone than, so far as I know, has been given to it by any of the Ancients who have treated of it. It cost me more trouble than almost anything of equal length I have ever written.—I.F.]

In 1815 and 1820 this poem was one of those "founded on the Affections"; afterwards it was classed among the "Poems of the Imagination."—Ed.

After meeting the Wordsworths at Charles Lamb's, on the 9th May 1815, Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his Diary: "It is the mere power which he is conscious of exerting in which he delights, not the production of a work in which men rejoice on account of the sympathies and sensibilities it excites in them. Hence, he does not much esteem his Laodamia, as it belongs to the inferior class of poems founded on the affections." (See Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, vol. i. p. 482.)

Wordsworth wrote thus to Walter Savage Landor, from Rydal Mount, on the 21st of January 1824:—

"You have condescended to minute criticism upon the Laodamia.[D] I concur with you in the first stanza, and had several times attempted to alter it upon your grounds. I cannot, however, accede to your objection to the 'second birth,' merely because the expression has been degraded by Conventiclers.[E] I certainly meant nothing more by it than the eadem cura, and the largior æther, etc., of Virgil's Sixth Æneid. All religions owe their origin or acceptation to the wish of the human heart to supply in another state of existence the deficiencies of this, and to carry still nearer to perfection what we admire in our present condition, so that there must be many modes of expression arising out of this coincidence, or rather identity of feeling common to all Mythologies; and under this observation I should shelter the phrase from your censure—but I may be wrong in the particular case, though certainly not in the general principle. This leads to a remark in your last—'that you are disgusted with all books that treat of religion.' I am afraid it is a bad sign in me, that I have little relish for any other. Even in poetry it is the imaginative only, viz., that which is conversant with or turns upon Infinity, that powerfully affects me. Perhaps I ought to explain: I mean to say that except in those passages, where things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised, I read with something too like indifference; but all great Poets are in this view powerful Religionists."

In 1815 Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, "Laodamia is a very original poem; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation." (The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i. p. 284.)

Mr. Hazlitt wrote of Laodamia: "It breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of antiquity—the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor of Death. Its glossy brilliancy arises from the perfection of the finishing, like that of careful sculpture, not from gaudy colouring—the texture of the thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of marble. It is a poem that might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and sages would gather round to listen to it."

I am indebted to the Headmaster of Fettes College, Edinburgh, the Rev. W. A. Heard, for the following illustrative notes on Laodamia:—

"This poem illustrates more completely than any other the sympathy of the poet with the spirit of antiquity in its purest and most exalted forms. The idea that underlies the poem is the same conception of 'pietas' which Virgil has embodied in the Æneid, and with which he has associated, especially in the sixth book, which Wordsworth in many passages recalls, great ethical and religious conceptions, derived in the main from the philosophy of Plato. 'Pietas' embraces all the duties of life that are based upon the affections—love of home and parents and children, love of the Gods of our Fathers, and a reverence for that great order of things in which man finds himself a part. The pious man believes in a destiny, or order transcending his own will: to exalt any passion, however innocent, above this, is a rebellion; to intensify any passion, so as to disturb the appropriate calm of resignation, is to act irreverently against the gods. Lesser duties must give way to greater: love of wife must give way to love of country, and the sorrow of bereavement must not obscure the larger issues of life. Thus, not only did Laodamia's yearning for the restoration of her husband to life show a failure to recognise the fixity of eternal laws, but her death was 'ὑπὲρ μόρον' and in reason's spite; it was, after all, self-will, and could not win the favour of heaven.

Blending with this notion of 'pietas,' we find the Platonic repudiation of sensuous and material life. This life is only a discipline under imperfect conditions, and to be set free from the passion and fretfulness of existence is the choice and longing of the wise.

The poem is thus notable, not so much for the assimilation of details, as for natural affinity to the spirituality of antiquity, of which Virgil is the purest exponent. Virgil's seriousness, his tenderness, his conception of the inevitable, and yet moral, order of the world, his desire for purification, his sadness, and yet complete freedom from unmanliness, his love of nature and belief in the sympathy of nature with man—all these are points of contact between the ancient and modern poet.