William Wordsworth 1770–1850

• Poets of the Lake District

• William Wordsworth (b. April 7, 1770—d.
April 23, 1850) Major English Romantic poet.
His LYRICAL BALLADS (1798), written with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the
English Romantic movement.

Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of

northern England. During a summer vacation
in 1790 he took a long walking tour through
revolutionary France. There he was caught
up in the passionate enthusiasm that
followed the fall of the Bastille and became
an ardent republican sympathizer.
• About this time Wordsworth became friends with Coleridge, and they formed a partnership
that would alter the course of English poetry. Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing
influences of nature and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797–98 to compose the short lyrical
and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered. Many were written to a daringly
original program aimed at breaking the decorum of Neoclassical verse. These poems appeared
in 1798 in a slim, anonymously authored volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, which opened with
Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s
TINTERN ABBEY.

• About 1798 Wordsworth began writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him
intermittently for the next 40 years, and which was eventually published in 1850 under the
title THE PRELUDE. In 1843 he succeeded Robert Southey as poet laureate.

• Some of the main features of Wordsworth's poetry are a spiritual veneration for nature, a
dislike for modernity, an interest in the individual and the imagination, a fascination with
childhood, and the employment of common language.
 I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
"IWAN DERED LONELY ASACL OUD"

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
 
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay: 10
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
 
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
 
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood, 20
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
•MEMORIALS OF A TOUR IN SCOTLAND, 1803

VIII. THE SOLITARY REAPER

BEHOLD her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.