O Duty! if that name thou love,
So it begins, and we may find ourselves being turned off right away. But do go on, do not stop after the first two lines; keep on to the end. The poem has something important to say to us, who may dislike the word “duty” intensely and think it is used by those in authority to gain our unthinking obedience to their commands. (And so it is.) What Wordsworth is saying is that in an uncertain world, dependence on “the genial sense of youth” and “being to myself a guide” have failed him, as they are likely to fail anyone. Having a clear, unwavering signal that we can follow and obey turns out, in the long run, to be better. Call this “duty” if you will, or call it anything else. Without it, life is likely to turn out to be a mess.
Of Wordsworth’s longer poems, “The Prelude,” the first part of an autobiographical “epic of Nature” that he worked on throughout his life, is important, beautiful, and fine. “The Prelude,” besides containing many moving scenes from his childhood and early youth, invokes the basic Wordsworthian ideas about nature and our never-ending quest for a deep relationship to it. By “Nature” you soon realize that he does not mean just trees and rocks and mountains and clouds, but also that natural element in ourselves, with which we must make peace or suffer great ill.
Later parts of this epic, notably “The Excursion,” can be skipped by most readers. Other than the two odes and “The Prelude,” there are a dozen or so wonderful sonnets and a dozen other lyrics that are as good as anything of their kind in the English language, maybe in any language. I have listed some of them below.
Read them, think about them for a while, and then read them again. Try to understand them sympathetically, remembering that Wordsworth was not a major thinker and that he lived a long time ago.
You may like those poems so much that you want to dip into the rest of Wordsworth. One way to begin is to obtain a facsimile copy of Lyrical Ballads and read Wordsworth and Coleridge’s preface and try to see what all the fuss was about.
Then, perhaps, move on to other things. It is, after all, no bad thing to be a Wordsworthian!
Poems of Wordsworth to read first: “The Prelude,” “The Simplon Pass,” “Influence of Natural Objects,” “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” “I Traveled Among Unknown Men,” “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal,” “My Heart Leaps Up,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge: September 3, 1802,” “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” “London 1802,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Ode to Duty,” “The World Is Too Much With Us,” “To Sleep,” “Personal Talk,” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
1772–1834
Selected Poems
The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in almost every way a disaster. He began to use drugs during his early twenties and he became an opium addict. He married the wrong woman, whom he despised and who despised him; but he did not believe in divorce. He was a great dreamer and projector: he loved projects and with his eloquence and charm could gain support for them. But most of his projects did not work out—notably an immense topical encyclopedia, which he called Metropolitana—and he spent much of his last years in bed, mumbling to himself about philosophy.
He knew a great deal about literature, perhaps more than anyone in his time. His collection of essays and reviews, Biographia Literaria, which he published when he was forty-five (in 1817), contained, it has been said, the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.
Unfortunately, the Romantic period was not noted for its criticism or its thought. It was instead an age of noble feelers, not thinkers: Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, Southey—none of them had a really respectable brain in his head.
Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772, the son of a schoolmaster who sent him to Cambridge. From the age of twenty he managed to eke out a meager living writing for newspapers and periodicals. He married in 1795 and immediately regretted doing so, as did his wife. This year also marked the beginning of that single short, glorious period in his life when he enjoyed one inspiring friendship and wrote half a dozen poems that are among the best in English.
The friendship, of course, was with the poet William Wordsworth, two years his senior: Coleridge was twenty-three, Wordsworth twenty-five. For the next two or three years they spent every minute together that they could, hatching plans, talking poetry, and producing a joint volume, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that had a profound influence on the future course of English poetry, its contents being written, they declared in a preface, in “the language of common day” rather than in the stilted poetic diction of the age just past.
Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in 1797, when he was very much under the sway of his friendship with Wordsworth. He was living at the time in a lonely cottage at Brimstone farm, on the coast of Somerset; he fell asleep, probably drugged, with a copy of Purchas his Pilgrimes, an antique travel book, in his hand. A passage he had been reading told of the building of the Great Khan’s immense pleasure palace at Xanadu. Coleridge awoke and immediately began to write down two or three hundred lines, as he later said, that he was conscious of having composed in his sleep. But he was interrupted by a certain “person from Porlock” who has never been identified, and so “Kubla Khan” remains unfinished to this day. It is probably the best unfinished poem in the language.
“Christabel” was also begun in 1797; it too is unfinished. It is a ballad—not a true ballad, because all such are anonymous—but as like a true ballad as a self-conscious production of a professional poet can be. It is a fine story, as far as it goes, with the stark, tragic character of the old ballads.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which opens Lyrical Ballads, is not only finished, it is perfect. It is full of “quotations”— the verse is magical—but perhaps the best thing about the poem is Coleridge’s restraint in never at any moment saying what it means. He knew well that the old ballads were fine because they simply told their story as directly as possible and let the reader interpret. So with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: instead of meanings there are wonderful images.
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, ” Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
To have painted those pictures in words makes up for all Coleridge’s failures.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
1743–1826
The Declaration of Independence