William Wordsworth at 250

ANNIVERSARIES

William Wordsworth at 250

On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, Cicely Havely issues an invitation to reconsider aspects of his work

Wordsworth’s poetical misfortune was to live too long (1770–1850), and the reputation of the poetry he wrote until about 1805 has been unfairly dulled by his later decline. The premature deaths of Keats and Shelley in 1821 and 1822, and a century later the deaths of so many promising young poets in the First World War, have somehow turned misfortune into myth. Genius that burns out early makes for a better story than genius that withers on the branch.

Formative years

Wordsworth’s early life was the source of his greatest poetry: ‘Fair seed-time had my soul’ he writes in his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude (only published on his death after many revisions). In his childhood he and his friends ran wild among the mountains of the English Lake District. Though his primary schooling was primitive, reading widely was encouraged, and he went on to Hawkshead Grammar School (a public school being beyond his parents’ means) and then to Cambridge in 1787. He graduated in 1791, but although the country boy was shocked by the metropolitan squalor of the city, the university made little mark on him — nor he on the university. What formed his mind was nature, a powerful sense of social justice and the conversation of his friends.

From 1790–91 he lived in France, when revolutionary fervour was at its height. Like many young men of his time, Wordsworth was elated:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! (The Prelude, XI, 108)

The excitement included falling in love with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a surgeon, but the increasingly fraught relationships between Britain and France forced Wordsworth back to England, alone, while Annette gave birth to their illegitimate daughter in 1792.

The descent of the Revolution into ‘the terror’ with its mass executions sickened and disillusioned him. In 1795 a small bequest allowed him to set up house with his sister Dorothy, in Somerset, where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and members of his radical circle, whose political beliefs regularly put them under government surveillance. They were once reported to have been talking of a sinister-sounding ‘Spy Nozy’ when they had been discussing the Dutch philosopher Spinoza who — rather like Wordsworth himself — saw God and Nature as one.

The Napoleonic Wars prevented Wordsworth from returning to France until 1802, when he met his nine-year-old daughter Caroline for the first time, and told her mother that he was about to marry Mary Hutchinson, whom he had known since his Cumberland childhood. At least he supported Annette financially for the rest of her life.

Radical attitudes

Lyrical Ballads, the collection that Wordsworth and Coleridge published together in 1798, has a title that reflected the two poets’ radical attitudes to the predominant values of their time, when ballads (traditional and vernacular) were seen as the very opposite of lyrical (refined and graceful). Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ is perhaps the only piece that could be described as a lyrical ballad, among an assortment of eighteenth-century-style descriptive passages, sketches of rural tragedy and would-be comedy vignettes.

The collection was put together to make money, but it did not sell well, even when in 1800 and 1802 Wordsworth added Prefaces to explain that the collection was an ‘experiment’ in which he had used ‘the real language of men’ to write poetry — a dramatic departure from the increasingly artificial and mannered diction of much late eighteenth-century poetry:

…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 sun And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. (‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, 19–25)

He also claimed that his ‘principal object’ was ‘to make the incidents of common life interesting’ — another radical departure: remember that Wordsworth was a near contemporary of Jane Austen, though he long out-lived her. Most of his ‘incidents’ are drawn from rural life ‘because in that situation the passions of man are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’ — and surely also because such incidents were what he knew best. From his childhood he had been a keen observer of how his rural neighbours had suffered from the increasingly rapacious enclosure of common land, the effects of industrialisation, and the depredations of war.

But though his intentions were lofty, the results can seem banal, even bathetic. ‘The Thorn’ tells a sad tale of madness and infanticide, but includes some notoriously humdrum lines:

I’ve measured it from side to side: Tis three feet long and two feet wide. (32–33)

Finding his great theme

Other poems in the collection can grow on the reader who has a little patience for Wordsworth’s stated aims. ‘The Idiot Boy’ is a rambling story of a midnight ride, and a devoted mother’s anxieties for a child with the severest of learning difficulties. No one else was writing anything like this: expressing the common tragedies of the rural poor in the day-to-day language they might use themselves.

These experiments helped Wordsworth to find his great theme — our relationship with the natural world, from the idiot boy’s inarticulate ‘glory’ to the moving acknowledgement that his own once ecstatic feelings have dulled:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. (‘Ode: Intimations of immortality’, 1802–04, 1–5)

This ode is a Wordsworth ‘must-read’. If The Prelude (the 13-part autobiographical poem which he never really finished) is too daunting, try the two-part early version from 1799. ‘Michael’ (1800) is a moving and sombre tribute to a shepherd’s stoicism, while ‘Margaret’, or ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (1795), tells the story of a war-widow’s lonely decline. Wordsworth has sometimes been described as sexless, but it is more useful to see him as the least sexist of the Romantic poets. His shepherdesses are no fanciful nymphs and he treats the feelings and experience of men and women with equal respect. He wrote no passionate love poetry that we know of, but the sequence called the Lucy poems (1799) is as elusive and tender as Thomas Hardy’s love poems from 1912–13:

No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. (‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, 5–8)

An eco-poet relevant today

Wordsworth worked in miniature as well as on a grand scale, and he may surprise you. Consider how odd it is that this great eco-poet, the bard of the mountains, should insist that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ than grimy old London (‘Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, 1802). 2020 is the 250th anniversary of his birth, but Wordsworth’s compassionate view of humanity’s relationship with the natural world is as relevant today as it was in his own time.

Cicely Havely is a former head of English at the Open University and is a member of the ENGLISH REVIEW editorial board.