He understood London, as no writer did until Dickens:
I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
“Chartered” means bought and sold; everything in London was for sale, Blake realized; if others had the slightest conception of this fact, they did not understand its implications. Once it had been different, he tells us in Songs of Innocence:
When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still.
These are but snatches, lines, verses from great poems. Read all of the Songs of Innocence and then, when you are feeling strong in spirit, all of the Songs of Experience. Read them in an edition that contains Blake’s own illustrations: these are strange and wonderful, like nothing ever seen. Compare the visions of a past that was once good and beautiful with a present and future that is bad and ugly. And then, when these images are solid in your mind, go on, perhaps, to such prose (or at least prosaic) works as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, and Jerusalem, despite the fact that these are very difficult to understand without the copious notes of critics and commentators.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
1770–1850
Selected Poems
William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, in the Lake District of England, in 1770, the son of a lawyer. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up by uncaring relatives. Much alone as a child and young man, he early came to depend upon nature for the solace that human beings provide to others. He attended Cambridge but did not distinguish himself there. From 1790, France was his abiding passion—that, and a young woman, Annette Vallon, whom he met and fell in love with there in 1791. She bore him a daughter in 1792, but he was unable to marry Annette or even to stay in France, partly because of his family’s refusal to provide him any financial assistance, partly because war soon broke out between England and France, to endure, except for one short respite, for more than twenty years (that is, until the Battle of Waterloo finally ended it in 1815). But though he was separated from Annette he never forgot her and was inspired by her to write some of his most beautiful lyrics—for example, “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free.”
Wordsworth returned to England in 1792 and for several years lived a fitful, undirected life, but he was saved from himself and his own unhappiness in 1795 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he met in that year and who inspired Wordsworth to devote himself exclusively to poetry. For the next three years the two young men were much together, and their friendship was productive for them both. Its first real fruit was the volume called Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1798 and in which the first poem was Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the last Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” two veritable treasures of English poetry.
In 1799, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he lived for much of his life, moved into Dove Cottage at Grasmere, ever after sacred to the memory of Wordsworth and the focus of poetic pilgrimages to this day. There Coleridge often visited, and there Wordsworth lived with Dorothy and his wife, Mary Hutchinson, until a growing family forced them all to move to Rydal Mount, where the poet lived until his death in 1850.
After 1805, Wordsworth was never again the same marvelous poet that he had been from the time of the meeting with Coleridge until the cares of ordinary life seemed to change and wear him down. But for that glorious decade he was one of the best poets who ever lived.
In reading Wordsworth, therefore, selection becomes extremely important. But there are further problems with Wordsworth that must be faced by the modern reader before he can be appreciated as he should be.
Wordsworth’s ideas possess a creaky, antique cast, and they are sometimes hard for contemporary readers to accept. Two of his finest longer lyrics, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” and “Ode to Duty,” suffer from the old-fashioned thought that underlies them.
There is nothing inherently wrong with old thoughts. Some old thoughts are a good deal better than some new ones. And the really fundamental ideas behind those two poems, as well as many others by Wordsworth, are not at all antique or useless, although they may indeed be old-fashioned. The trouble is in the presentation of these ideas, which comes down to Wordsworth’s rather bland assumption that his readers—then and now—will all agree with his thinking about them.
The real problem is that when it came to thought, Wordsworth was not first rate. He is a great poet in every other respect: as a versifier he is unequaled; he is voluminous; he is clear; he has many beauties; he is powerful and moving. Lacking, however, a certain power of mind, he cannot be placed in the very first rank of poets, the rank occupied by such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. But he is firmly ensconced in the second rank, just behind them, by virtue of a relatively small number of poems (relatively small in relation to his enormous corpus). And those really must be read.
Take “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” If you have not read this before, you will be astonished at how many quotations derive from it. Which means, of course, that portions of it, individual lines and collections of lines, have become almost a part of the language: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” and so forth.
These famous lines, and others like them, actually get in the way of reading and understanding the poem. It is too easy to gloss over it, swimming with the current of pretty sounds and lovely images, without thinking. But the basic idea here, although creaky, is nevertheless worth serious consideration: the idea that human life is a sad, continuous, and unavoidable falling away from a state of existence that we somehow perceived when we were children but are no longer able to perceive when we grow up:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Those lines are from a different poem, a famous sonnet, but they expressed much the same idea as does the “Ode,” an idea that Wordsworth expressed in other poems, too. When he says it as well as he does in the sonnet, the idea is compelling. We are tempted to say, Yes, that is right, we have; we have given up more than we should. Maybe we did not have to do it, we think. Which is what Wordsworth wanted us to feel.
The famous “Ode to Duty” has the same kind of problems as the “Ode to Immortality”:
Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!