Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson by William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

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IN MEMORIAM

XXVII

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes 5
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth 10
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost 15
Than never to have lov'd at all.

LXIV

Dost thou look back on what hath been,
As some divinely gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green;

Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, 5
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,
And grapples with his evil star;

Who makes by force his merit known
And lives to clutch the golden keys, 10
To mould a mighty state's decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;

And moving up from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope
The pillar of a people's hope, 15
The centre of a world's desire;

Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,
When all his active powers are still,
A distant dearness in the hill,
A secret sweetness in the stream, 20

The limit of his narrower fate,
While yet beside its vocal springs
He play'd at counsellors and kings,
With one that was his earliest mate;

Who ploughs with pain his native lea 25
And reaps the labour of his hands,
Or in the furrow musing stands;
"Does my old friend remember me?"

LXXXIII

Dip down upon the northern shore,
O sweet new-year delaying long;
Thou doest expectant nature wrong;
Delaying long, delay no more.

What stays thee from the clouded noons, 5
Thy sweetness from its proper place?
Can trouble live with April days,
Or sadness in the summer moons?

Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,
The little speedwell's darling blue, 10
Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew,
Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.

O thou, new-year, delaying long,
Delayest the sorrow in my blood,
That longs to burst a frozen bud 15
And flood a fresher throat with song.

LXXXVI

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below 5
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath 10
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odour streaming far,
To where in yonder orient star 15
A hundred spirits whisper "Peace."

CI

Unwatch'd, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away;

Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, 5
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air;

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain, 10
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break 15
The sailing moon in creek and cove;

Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child; 20

As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.

CXIV

Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

But on her forehead sits a fire: 5
She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.

Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain--
She cannot fight the fear of death. 10
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain

Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst
All barriers in her onward race
For power. Let her know her place; 15
She is the second, not the first.

A higher hand must make her mild,
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child: 20

For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.
O friend, who earnest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind

I would the great world grew like thee, 25
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.

CXV

Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow,

Now rings the woodland loud and long, 5
The distance takes a lovelier hue,
And drown'd in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song.

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
The flocks are whiter down the vale, 10
And milkier every milky sail
On winding stream or distant sea;

Where now the seamew pipes, or dives
In yonder greening gleam, and fly
The happy birds, that change their sky 15
To build and brood, that live their lives

From land to land; and in my breast
Spring wakens too; and my regret
Becomes an April violet,
And buds and blossoms like the rest. 20

CXVIII

Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;

But trust that those we call the dead 5
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms, 10
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;

Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place, 15
If so he type this work of time

Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore, 20

But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly 25
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast
And let the ape and tiger die.

CXXIII

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow 5
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell,
And dream my dream, and hold it true; 10
For tho' my lips may breathe adieu,
I cannot think the thine farewell.

WORDSWORTH

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7th,
1770. His father, John Wordsworth, was the agent of Sir J. Lowther,
who later became the first Earl of Lonsdale. At the age of eight the
boy was sent to school at Hawkshead. The impressions of his boyhood
period are related in the autobiographical poem, _The Prelude_,
(written 1805, published 1850), and from this poetical record we
discern how strong the influences of Nature were to shape and develop
his imagination. Wordsworth's father died in 1783, leaving the family
poorly provided for. The main asset was a considerable claim upon the
Earl of Lonsdale, which that individual refused to pay. On his death,
in 1802, the successor to the title and estates paid the amount of the
claim in full with accumulated interest. In the interval, however, the
Wordsworth family remained in very straitened circumstances. Enough
money was provided by Wordsworth's guardians to send him to Cambridge
University In 1787. He entered St. John's College, and after an
undistinguished course graduated without honors in January, 1791. His
vacations were spent chiefly in Hawkshead and Wales, but one memorable
vacation was marked by a walking excursion with a friend through France
and Switzerland, the former country then being on the verge of
revolution.

Shortly after leaving the University, in November, 1791, Wordsworth
returned to France, remaining there until December of the following
year. During this period he was completely won over to the principles
of the revolution. The later reaction from these principles
constituted the one moral struggle of his life.

In 1793 his first work appeared before the public--two poems, entitled
_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_. Coleridge, who read
these pieces at Cambridge, divined that they announced the emergence of
an original poetical genius above the horizon. Readers of the poems
to-day, who are wise after the event, could scarcely divine as much.
At about this period Wordsworth received a bequest of 900 pounds from
Raisley Calvert, which enabled him and his sister Dorothy to take a
small cottage at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Here he wrote a number of
poems in which he worked off the ferment of his revolutionary ideas.
These ideas can scarcely be said to have troubled him much in later
years.

An important incident in his life, hardly second in importance to the
stimulating companionship of his sister, was his meeting with
Coleridge, which occurred probably towards the close of 1795.
Coleridge, who was but little younger than Wordsworth, had the more
richly equipped, if not the more richly endowed, mind. He was living
at Nether Stowey, and in order to benefit by the stimulus which such a
friendship offered, the Wordsworth's moved to Alfoxden, three miles
away from Stowey (July, 1797). It was during a walking expedition to
the Quantock Hills in November of that year that the poem of _The
Ancient Mariner_ was planned. It was intended that the poem should be
a joint production, but Wordsworth's contribution was confined to the
suggestion of a few details merely, and some scattered lines which are
indicated in the notes to that poem. Their poetic theories were soon
to take definite shape in the publication of the famous _Lyrical
Ballads_ (September, 1798), to which Coleridge contributed _The Ancient
Mariner_, and Wordsworth some characteristic lyrical, reflective, and
narrative poems. The excessive simplicity and alleged triviality of
some of these poems long continued to give offence to the conservative
lovers of poetry. Even to-day we feel that Wordsworth was sometimes
the victim of his own theories.

In June of this same year (1798) Wordsworth and his sister accompanied
Coleridge to Germany. They soon parted company, the Wordsworths
settling at Goslar, while Coleridge, intent upon study, went in search
of German metaphysics at Gottingen. Wordsworth did not come into any
contract with German life or thought, but sat through the winter by a
stove writing poems for a second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_.
April, 1799, found the brother and sister again in England. In
December they settled down at Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere, and
never, save for brief intervals, abandoned the Lake Country. In 1802,
as has been said, a slight accession of fortune fell to Wordsworth by
the settlement of the Lonsdale claim. The share of each of the family
was 1,800 pounds. On the strength of this wind-fall the poet felt that
he might marry, and accordingly brought home Mary Hutchinson as his
wife.

The subsequent career of Wordsworth belongs to the history of poetry.
Of events in the ordinary sense there are few to record. He
successively occupies three houses in the Lake Country after abandoning
Dove Cottage. We find him at Allan Bank in 1808, in the Parsonage at
Grasmere in 1810, and at Rydal Mount from 1813 to his death in 1850.
He makes occasional excursions to Scotland or the Continent, and at
long intervals visits London, where Carlyle sees him and records his
vivid impressions. For many years Wordsworth enjoys the sinecure of
Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland (400 pounds a year), and on his
resignation of that office in his son's favor, he is placed on the
Civil List for a well deserved pension of 300 pounds. On Southey's
death, in 1843, he is appointed Poet Laureate. He died at Grasmere on
April 23rd, 1850.

Wordsworth's principal long poems are: _The Prelude_ (1805 published
1850); _The Excursion_ (1814); _The White Doe of Rylstone_ (1815) and
_Peter Bell The Waggoner_ (1819). His fame rests principally on his
shorter narrative poems, his meditative lyrics, including his two great
odes, _To Duty_ and _On the Intimations of Immortality_, and on the
sonnets, which rank with the finest in the language. The longer poems
have many fine passages exhibiting his powers of graphic description,
and illustrating his mystical philosophy of nature.

Thomas Carlyle's description of Wordsworth is of interest: "For the
rest, he talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity, and
force, as a wise tradesman would of his tools and workshop, and as no
unwise one could. His voice was good, frank, and sonorous, though
practically clear, distinct, and forcible, rather than melodious; the
tone of him, businesslike, sedately confident; no discourtesy, yet no
anxiety about being courteous. A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as
his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he
said and did. You would have said that he was a usually taciturn man,
glad to unlock himself to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when
such offered itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful,
meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent so much as close,
impregnable, and hard; a man _multa tacere loquive paratus_, in a world
where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along.
The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness; there
was enough of brow, and well-shaped; rather too much cheek ('horse
face' I have heard satirists say); face of squarish shape, and
decidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its length going
horizontal); he was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and
strong-looking when he stood, a right good old steel-gray figure, with
rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a vivacious strength
looking through him, which might have suited one of those old
steel-gray markgrafs whom Henry the Fowler set up towards the 'marches'
and do battle with the intrusive heathen in a stalwart and judicious
manner."

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

Born, April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth, Cumberland.

Goes to Hawkshead Grammar School, 1778.

Sent by guardians to St. John's College, Cambridge, October, 1787.

Foreign tour with Jones, 1790.

Graduates as B.A. without honors, January, 1791.

Residence in France, November, 1791, to December, 1792.

Publication of _The Evening Walk_, and _Descriptive Sketches_, 1793.

Legacy from Raisley Calvert of 900 pounds, 1794.

Lives at Racedown, Dorsetshire, autumn of 1795 to summer of 1797.

Composes _The Borderers_, a tragedy, 1795-1796.

Close friendship with Coleridge begins in 1797.

Rents a house at Alfoxden, 1797.

Genesis of the _Lyrical Ballads_, 1797.

_Lyrical Ballads_ published September, 1798.

German visit, September, 1798, to April, 1799.

Lives at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, December 21, 1799 to 1806, 1807-1808.

The Lonsdale debt of 8,500 pounds repaid, 1802.

Marries Mary Hutchinson, October, 1802.

Death by drowning of his brother, Captain John Wordsworth, 1805.

Lives at Coleorton, Leicestershire, 1806 to 1807.

Collected Edition of poems, 1807.

Lives at Allan Bank, Easedale, 1808 to 1810.

Lives at the Parsonage, Grasmere, 1810 to 1812.

Loss of two children and removal to Rydal Mount, Grasmere, 1813 to 1850.

Appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland (400 pounds a year),
1813.

_The Excursion_ appears, July, 1814.

Honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, 1839.

Resigns his office as distributor of stamps, 1842.

Receives a pension from Sir R. Peel of 300 pounds, 1842.

Appointed Poet Laureate, 1843.

Dies at Grasmere, April 23, 1850.

APPRECIATIONS

Coleridge, with rare insight, summarized Wordsworth's characteristic
defects and merits as follows;

"The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I
appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the
style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared
transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity (at all events
striking and original) to a style, not only unimpassioned but
undistinguished.

"The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
reader will pardon an uncouth and newly-coined word. There is, I
should say, not seldom a _matter-of-factness_ in certain poems. This
may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
representation of objects, and there positions, as they appeared to the
poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in
order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, when nothing is
taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry,
where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. . .

"Third; an undue predilection for the _dramatic_ form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, where
two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. . .

"The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but
yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. . .

"Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. . .

"To these defects, which . . . are only occasional, I may oppose . . .
the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies:

"First; an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically;
in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. . .

"The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's works is--a
correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not
from books, but from the poet's own meditative observations. They are
fresh and have the dew upon them. . .

"Third; . . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and
paragraphs; the frequent _curiosa felicitas_ of his diction. . .

"Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expressions to all
the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and
perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality
only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the
polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its
objects; but on the contrary, brings out many a vein and many a tint,
which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of
gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the
traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .

"Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a
contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the
sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or
even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The
superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to
_him_ under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled
or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves
in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In
this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a
compeer. Such as he is; so he writes.

"Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and
sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of
all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
unborrowed and his own."

These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of
Wordsworth.

Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of
Wordsworth's poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted. "I
firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after
that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes
the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the
Elizabethan age to the present time." His essential greatness is to be
found in his shorter pieces, despite the frequent intrusion of much
that is very inferior. Still it is "by the great body of powerful and
significant work which remains to him after every reduction and
deduction has been made, that Wordsworth's superiority is proved."

Coleridge had not dwelt sufficiently, perhaps, upon the joyousness
which results from Wordsworth's philosophy of human life and external
nature. This Matthew Arnold considers to be the prime source of his
greatness. "Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary
power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in the simple
primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power
with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so
as to make us share it." Goethe's poetry, as Wordsworth once said, is
not inevitable enough, is too consciously moulded by the supreme will
of the artist. "But Wordsworth's poetry," writes Arnold, "when he is
at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might
seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote
his poem for him." The set poetic style of _The Excursion_ is a
failure, but there is something unique and unmatchable in the simple
grace of his narrative poems and lyrics. "Nature herself seems, I say,
to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own
bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from two causes: from the
profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also
from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject
itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most
plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may
often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of _Resolution and
Independence_; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with
a baldness which is full of grandeur. . . Wherever we meet with the
successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with
profound truth of execution, he is unique."

Professor Dowden has also laid stress upon the harmonious balance of
Wordsworth's nature, his different faculties seeming to interpenetrate
one another, and yield mutual support. He has likewise called
attention to the austere naturalism of which Arnold speaks.
"Wordsworth was a great naturalist in literature, but he was also a
great Idealist; and between the naturalist and the idealist in
Wordsworth no opposition existed: each worked with the other, each
served the other. While Scott, by allying romance with reality, saved
romantic fiction from the extravagances and follies into which it had
fallen, Wordsworth's special work was to open a higher way for
naturalism in art by its union with ideal truth."

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