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

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Criticism has long since ceased to ridicule his _Betty Foy_, and his
_Harry Gill_, whose "teeth, they chatter, chatter still." Such
malicious sport proved only too easy for Wordsworth's contemporaries,
and still the essential value of his poetry was unimpaired.

The range of poetry is indeed inexhaustible, and even the greatest
poets must suffer some subtraction from universal pre-eminence.
Therefore we may frankly admit the deficiencies of Wordsworth,--that he
was lacking in dramatic force and in the power of characterization;
that he was singularly deficient in humor, and therefore in the saving
grace of self-criticism in the capacity to see himself occasionally in
a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none
of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave
him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural
force makes his passion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All
this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon
English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country,
he must be named after Shakespeare and Milton. The intellectual value
of his work will endure; for leaving aside much valuable doctrine,
which from didactic excess fails as poetry, he has brought into the
world a new philosophy of Nature and has emphasised in a manner
distinctively his own the dignity of simple manhood.--_Pelham Edgar_.

REFERENCES ON WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND WORKS

_Wordsworth_ by F. W. H. Myers, in _English Men of Letters_ series.
Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Wordsworth_ by Walter Raleigh, London: Edward Arnold.

_Wordsworth_ by Rosaline Masson, in _The People's Books_ series.
London: T. C. & E. C. Jack,

_Wordsworthiana_ edited by William Knight. Toronto: The Macmillan
Company of Canada, Limited.

_Essays Chiefly on Poetry_ by Aubrey de Vere, 2 volumes. Toronto: The
Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Literary Essays_ by Richard Holt Hutton. Toronto: The Macmillan
Company of Canada, Limited.

_Studies in Literature_ by Edward Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co., Ltd.

_Aspects of Poetry_ by J. S. C. Shairp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and
Company.

_Lives of Great English Writers from Chaucer to Browning_ by Walter S.
Hinchman and Francis B. Gummere. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

_Great English Poets_ by Julian Hill. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs &
Co.

_The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_ by William Morton
Payne. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

_The Religious Spirit in the Poets_ by W. Boyd Carpenter, New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell & Co,

_Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson_ by Francis T. Palgrave.
Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_A History of Nineteenth Century Literature_ by George Saintsbury.
Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Personal Traits of British Authors_ by E. T. Mason. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.

_The English Poets_ edited by T. Humphrey Ward, Vol. iv. Toronto: The
Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Selections from Wordsworth_ edited by Matthew Arnold in _The Golden
Treasury Series_. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_Literary Studies_ by Walter Bagehot, Vol. ii. London: Longmans,
Green and Co.

_A Study of English and American Poets_ by J. Scott Clark. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons.

_Prophets of the Century_ edited by Arthur Rickett. London: Ward Lock
and Co., Limited.

_History of English Literature_ by A. S. Mackenzie. Toronto: The
Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

_A Student's History of English Literature_ by William Edward Simonds.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

_Poems of William Wordsworth_ edited by Edward Dowden. Boston: Ginn &
Company.

_Home Life of Great Authors_ by Hattie Tyng Griswold. Chicago: A. C.
McClurg & Co.

NOTES

MICHAEL

The poem was composed in 1800, and published in the second volume of the
_Lyrical Ballads_ in the same year. "Written at the Town-end, Grasmere,
about the same time as _The Brothers_. The Sheep-fold, on which so much
of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and
circumstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many
years before, the house we lived in at Town-end, along with some fields
and woodlands on the eastern shore of Grasmere. The name of the Evening
Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side
of the valley, more to the north."

In a letter to Charles James Fox the poet says: "In the two poems, _The
Brothers_ and _Michael_, I have attempted to draw a picture of the
domestic affections, as I know they exist among a class of men who are
now almost confined to the north of England. They are small independent
_proprietors_ of land, here called 'statesmen' [i.e., estates-men], men
of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties. . .
Their little tract of land serves as a kind of rallying point for their
domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes
them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise
be forgotten. The two poems that I have mentioned were written to show
that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."

Edward Fulton in a _A Selection of the Shorter Poems of Wordsworth_
(Macmillan) says: "The reason Wordsworth succeeds best in describing the
type of character portrayed in _Michael_ and _The Brothers_ is, of
course, chiefly because he knew that type best; but the fact that it was
the type for which he himself might have stood as the representative was
not without its effect upon him. His ideal man is but a variation of
himself. As Dean Church puts it: 'The ideal man with Wordsworth is the
hard-headed, frugal, unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his
strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet and beautiful home;
and this dalesman, built up by communion with nature and by meditation
into the poet-philosopher, with his serious faith and his never-failing
spring of enjoyment, is himself.' Types of character wholly alien to his
own have little attraction for him. He is content to look into the
depths of his own heart and to represent what he sees there. His field
of vision, therefore, is a very limited one: it takes in only a few
types. It is _man_, in fact, rather than men, that interests him."

The poem _Michael_ is well adapted to show Wordsworth's powers of
realism. He describes the poem as "a pastoral," which at once induces a
comparison, greatly to Wordsworth's advantage, with the pseudo-pastorals
of the age of Pope. There the shepherds and shepherdesses were scarcely
the pale shadows of reality, while Wordsworth's poem never swerves from
the line of truth. "The poet," as Sir Henry Taylor says with reference
to _Michael_, "writes in his confidence to impart interest to the
realities of life, deriving both the confidence and the power from the
deep interest which he feels in them. It is an attribute of unusual
susceptibility of imagination to need no extraordinary provocatives; and
when this is combined with intensity of observation and peculiarity of
language, it is the high privilege of the poet so endowed to rest upon
the common realities of life and to dispense with its anomalies." The
student should therefore be careful to observe (1) the truth of
description, and the appropriateness of the description to the
characters; (2) the strong and accurate delineation of the characters
themselves. Not only is this to be noted in the passages where the poet
has taken pains openly to portray their various characteristics, but
there are many passages, or single lines perhaps, which serve more subtly
to delineate them. What proud reserve, what sorrow painfully restrained,
the following line, for example, contains: "Two evenings after he had
heard the news."

TO THE DAISY

COMPOSED 1802: PUBLISHED 1807

"This and the other poems addressed to the same flower were composed at
Town-end, Grasmere, during the earlier part of my residence there." The
three poems on the Daisy were the outpourings of one mood, and were
prompted by the same spirit which moved him to write his poems of humble
life. The sheltered garden flowers have less attraction for him than the
common blossoms by the wayside. In their unobtrusive humility these
"unassuming Common-places of Nature" might be regarded, as the poet says,
"as administering both to moral and spiritual purposes." The "Lesser
Celandine," buffeted by the storm, affords him, on another occasion, a
symbol of meek endurance.

Shelley and Keats have many beautiful references to flowers in their
poetry. Keats has merely a sensuous delight in their beauty, while
Shelley both revels in their hues and fragrance, and sees in them a
symbol of transitory loveliness. His _Sensitive Plant_ shows his
exquisite sympathy for flower life.

TO THE CUCKOO

COMPOSED IN THE ORCHARD AT TOWN-END 1802: PUBLISHED 1807

Wordsworth, in his Preface to the 1815 edition, has the following note on
ll. 3, 4 of the poem:--"This concise interrogation characterises the
seeming ubiquity of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of
corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of
her power, by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost
perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an
object of sight." The cuckoo is the bird we associate with the name of
the vale of sunshine and of flowers, and yet its wandering voice brings
back to him the thought of his vanished childhood. We have already
noticed the almost sacred value which Wordsworth attaches to the
impressions of his youth, and even to the memory of these impressions
which remains with him to console his maturer life. The bird is a link
which binds him to his childhood:

"And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again."

In other poems, especially in the _Intimaticns of Immortality_, he speaks
of "the glory and the freshness of a dream," which hallowed nature for
him as a child, and which grew fainter as the "shades of the prison-house
began to close upon the growing Boy".

NUTTING

COMPOSED 1799; PUBLISHED 1800.

"Written in Germany; intended as a part of a poem on my own life, but
struck out as not being wanted there. Like most of my schoolfellows, I
was an impassioned Nutter. For this pleasure, the Vale of Esthwaite,
abounding in coppice wood, furnished a very wide range. These verses
arose out of the remembrance of feelings I had often had when a boy, and
particularly in the extensive woods that still stretch from the side of
Esthwaite Lake towards Graythwaite."

Wordsworth possessed in an unusual degree the power of reviving the
impressions of his youth. Few autobiographical records are so vivid in
this respect as his _Prelude_. In his famous ode on the _Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_, he dwells upon the
unreflective exultation which in the child responds to the joyousness of
nature, and with a profound intuition that may not be justified in the
facts, he sees in this heedless delight a mystical intimation of
immortality.

In the poem _Nutting_ the animal exhilaration of boyhood is finely
blended with this deeper feeling of mystery. The boy exultingly
penetrates into one of those woodland retreats where nature seems to be
holding communion with herself. For some moments he is subdued by the
beauty of the place, and lying among the flowers he hears with ecstasy
the murmur of the stream. Then the spirit of ravage peculiar to boyhood
comes over him, and he rudely mars the beauty of the spot:

"And the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being:"

Such wantonness seems to his maturer reflection a sacrilege, and even the
boy was not insensible to the silent reproach of the "intruding sky."

TOUCH,--FOR THERE IS A SPIRIT IN THE WOODS. Many lines might be quoted
from Wordsworth to illustrate his theory of the personal attributes of
nature. In some of his more elevated passages nature in all her
processes is regarded as the intimate revelation of the Godhead, the
radiant garment in which the Deity clothes Himself that our senses may
apprehend Him. Thus, when we touch a tree or a flower we may be said to
touch God himself. In this way the beauty and power of nature become
sacred for Wordsworth, and inspired his verse at times with a solemn
dignity to which other poets have rarely attained.

The immanence of God in nature, and yet His superiority to His own
revelation of Himself is beautifully expressed in some of the later
verses of _Hart Leap Well_:

"The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves."

Yet the life in nature is capable of multiplying itself infinitely, and
each of her manifold divisions possesses a distinctive mood; one might
almost say a separate life of its own. It is, in his ability to capture
the true emotional mood which clings to some beautiful object or scene in
nature, and which that object or scene may truly be said to inspire, that
Wordsworth's power lies.

Wordsworth possessed every attribute necessary to the descriptive
poet,--subtle powers of observation, ears delicately tuned to seize the
very shadow of sound, and a diction of copious strength suggestive beyond
the limits of ordinary expression. Yet purely descriptive poetry he
scorned. "He expatiated much to me one day," writes Mr. Aubrey de Vere,
"as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature
had been described by one of the most justly popular of England's modern
poets--one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect
[evidently Sir Walter Scott]. 'He took pains,' Wordsworth said; 'he went
out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever struck him
most--a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it,
a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home
and wove the whole together into a poetical description.' After a pause,
Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and impassioned voice; 'But
Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should
have left his pencil and note-book at home, fixed his eye as he walked
with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into
a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had
passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He
would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was
preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated; that which
remained--the picture surviving in his mind--would have presented the
ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in a large part by
discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic.
In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a
true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on
them.'"

The student should learn to compare the descriptive methods of Coleridge
and Wordsworth. See especially Lowell's note quoted on pp. 197-198; also
see pp. 47 f.

INFLUENCE OF NATURAL OBJECTS

This poem was composed at Goslar in 1799 as part of the first book of
_The Prelude_ (published in 1850). It was first printed in Coleridge's
periodical _The Friend_, in December, 1809, with the instructive though
pedantic title, "Growth of Genius from the Influences of Natural Objects
on the Imagination, in Boyhood and Early Youth." It appeared in
Wordsworth's poems of 1815 with the following title:--"Influence of
Natural Objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in
Boyhood and Early Youth."

The opening verses of this poem are still another instance of the
identification of God with nature. As Mr. Stopford Brooke writes, "we
are here in contact with a Person, not with a thought. But who is this
person? Is she only the creation of imagination, having no substantive
reality beyond the mind of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic
impersonation of an actual Being, the form which the poet gives to the
living Spirit of God in the outward world, in order that he may possess a
metaphysical thought as a subject for his work as an artist."

_The Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey_ contain the highest expression
which Wordsworth has given to this thought, To the heedless animal
delight in nature had succeeded a season in his youth when the beauty and
power of nature "haunted him like a passion," though he knew not why.
The "dizzy rapture" of those moods he can no longer feel. Yet,

"Not for this
Faint I nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. _And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things_."

In ll. 42-46, of _The Influence of Natural Objects_, we have an
inimitable Wordsworthian effect. Into the midst of his wild sport the
voice of Nature steals, and subdues his mind to receive the impulses of
peace and beauty from without. We involuntarily think of the boy he has
celebrated, his playmate upon Windermere, who loved to rouse the owls
with mimic hootings, but

"When a lengthened pause
Of silence came and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."
_The Prelude_, v. 379 f.

ELEGIAC STANZAS

COMPOSED 1805: PUBLISHED 1807.

Further references to John Wordsworth will be found in the following
poems:--_To the Daisy_ ("Sweet Flower"), _Elegiac Verses in Memory of My
Brother_, _When to the Attractions of the Busy World_, _The Brothers_,
and _The Happy Warrior_.

With lines 33-40, and 57-60, compare the _Intimations of Immortality_,
ll. 176-187:--

"What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind."

A BRIEF HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE SONNET

The sonnet form was introduced into English poetry by Sir Thomas Wyatt
and the Earl of Surrey. Their experiments in the sonnet were published
in _Tottel's Miscellany_ in 1557, and were prompted by an admiration of
Petrarch and other Italian models. Italy was almost certainly the
original home of the sonnet (sonnet=Ital. _sonetto_, _a little sound_, or
_short strain_, from _suono_, _sound_), and there it has been assiduously
cultivated since the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century Dante
and Petrarch gave the form a European celebrity.

The Structure of the Sonnet.

Before saying anything of its development in English poetry, it is
advisable to examine an admittedly perfect sonnet, so that we may gain an
idea of the nature of this type of poem, both as to form and substance.
Wordsworth's sonnet upon Milton (_London_, 1802) will serve our purpose
(see page 187). By reference to it you will observe:--

(1) That the sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, and consists of
fourteen lines--that number by repeated experimentation having been found
the most appropriate for the expression of a single emotional mood.

(2) As an examination of the rimes will show (a b b a a b b a: c d d e c
e), there is a natural metrical division at the end of the eighth line.
The first eight lines in technical language are called the "octave," the
last six lines are called the "sestet." The octave is sometimes said to
consist of two quatrains, and the sestet of two tercets.

(3) There is not only a metrical division between the octave and the
sestet, but the character of the thought also undergoes a subtle change
at that point. It is to be understood, of course, that in the whole poem
there must be both unity of thought and mood. Yet, at the ninth line,
the thought which is introduced in the octave is elaborated, and
presented as it were under another aspect. As Mr. Mark Pattison has
admirably expressed it: "This thought or mood should be led up to, and
opened in the early lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain;
in the second quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of
it. After the second quatrain there should be a pause--not full, nor
producing the effect of a break--as of one who had finished what he had
got to say, and not preparing a transition to a new subject, but as of
one who is turning over what has been said in the mind to enforce it
further. The opening of the second system, strictly the first tercet,
should turn back upon the thought or sentiment, take it up and carry it
forward to the conclusion. The conclusion should be a resultant summing
the total of the suggestion in the preceding lines. . . . While the
conclusion should leave a sense of finish and completeness, it is
necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point."

(4) An examination of the rimes again will show that greater strictness
prevails in the octave than in the sestet. The most regular type of the
octave may be represented by a b b a a b b a, turning therefore upon two
rimes only. The sestet, though it contains but six lines, is more
liberal in the disposition of its rimes. In the sonnet which we are
examining, the rime system of the sestet in c d d e c e--containing, as
we see, three separate rimes. In the sestet this is permissible,
provided that there is not a riming couplet at the close.

(5) Again, with reference to the rime, it will be observed that the vowel
terminals of the octave and the sestet are differentiated. Anything
approaching assonance between the two divisions is to be counted as a
defect.

(6) It is evident that there is unity both of thought and mood in this
sonnet, the sestet being differentiated from the octave, only as above
described.

(7) It is almost unnecessary to add that there is no slovenly diction,
that the language is dignified in proportion to the theme, and that there
is no obscurity or repetition in thought or phraseology.

These rules will appear to the young reader of poetry as almost
unnecessarily severe. But it must be remembered that the sonnet is
avowedly a conventional form (though in it much of the finest poetry in
our language is contained), and as such the conventional laws attaching
to all prescribed forms must be observed to win complete success.

Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton have lent the authority of their great
names to certain distinct variations from the rigid Petrarchan type. The
peculiarity of Spenser's sonnets is that the rime of the octave overflows
into the sestet, thus marring the exquisite balance which should subsist
between the two parts, and yielding an effect of cloying sweetness.
Although the famous stanza-form which he invented in his "Faerie Queene"
has found many imitators, his sonnet innovations are practically
unimportant.

The Shakespearean sonnet, on the contrary, must be regarded as a
well-established variant from the stricter Italian form. Though
Shakespeare's name has made it famous, it did not originate with him.
Surrey and Daniel had habitually employed it, and in fact it had come to
be recognized as the accepted English form. Its characteristic feature,
as the following sonnet from Shakespeare will show, was a division into
three distinct quatrains, each with alternating rimes, and closed by a
couplet. The transition of thought at the ninth line is usually
observed:--

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee--and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

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