Being a poem to Coleridge, the poem ends by addressing him, and with some of the finest lines he (or anyone else) ever wrote:For some background on The Prelude, I would very much recommend to any interested readersFive years have passed; five summers, with the lengthFrom Four Views of Tintern Abbey by Frederick CalbertAfter a fairly ‘directionless’ youth (to quote the Stephen Gill study cited above), which Wordsworth himself described in ‘The Prelude’ as a period of ‘shapeless eagerness’, the poet eventually, at twenty-eight, published Lyrical Ballads. But even out of context, some of the beauty of both sentiment and sonority comes through, e.g.,Most of the poem is occupied with the speech of Nature—too complex and protracted to delve into here—but concludes on notes of quiescence, melancholy, and absence:Lucy seems to hover between allegory (her name means Light) and (for want of a better word) reality. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth.
This Ode (another form, like the sonnet, in which Wordsworth outdid just about everyone—short perhaps of Horace and Hölderlin) gives Wordsworth’s most famous engagement with the Rousseauan idea of the natural insight and purity of the child—a doctrine which we still somewhat entertain today, even after the desecrations of Freud. Beautiful and memorable though this stanza is, I myself find this position much too bookish in its following of Romantic orthodoxy.



He took this well-worn love poetry form and used it for truly inventive and original ends. (The theological language is no mistake: for in the next stanza the throstle is called ‘no mean preacher’—surely a remark that gives away that Wordsworth’s ‘Matthew’ is buried in something like recondite religious scholarship.) The poem then concludes on another note of exhortation, which resounds in the reader’s mind long, long, after the poem ceases to be read:“What thoughts must through the creatures brain have pass’d!This is a somewhat overlooked poem which appears early in the second volume of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. And he is not so much a distant, admired figure as he is a dear friend to those who love to read him and hear the music of his lines.Wordsworth is the best kind of moralist: although obsessed with goodness, and though striving to be good, he had his faults. CharlesIn my opinion this is the finest essay on any subject I have yet read on the SCP site.

Fortunately, the two versions have been put together (with the two-book 1799 Prelude and the 1798 fragment) in Opening this volume, one is met with the achingly beautiful fragment which was to become the great later work:By 1805 a new beginning has fallen into place, one of Wordsworth’s most beautiful openings:This vast and beautiful poem then ranges over Wordsworth’s childhood, school, university, his intellectual life, travels, life in London, France in the time of the Revolution, and concludes on a note of exaltation as Wordsworth addresses, one-by-one, his closest relatives and friends. For this side of Wordsworth, read ‘An Evening Walk’, or the wonderful ‘Descriptive Sketches’. The next stanza is one of the most successful, and the most lapidary, that Wordsworth ever wrote:Perhaps it can. However it does only give the young Wordsworth, and I might say for that reason that it is better employed as a volume for someone who already knows his general works since, replete with great poems as Lyrical Ballads is, certain aspects of it may weary the new reader, if he or she does not already have a firmer picture of Wordsworth’s career and his future greatness in mind.I should like to warn readers away from Oxford’s Wordsworth: The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill.

There are many fine examples in the later edition that are not as well known, such as ‘Hart-Leap Well’, which we have included in this list.Although full of great moments, Lyrical Ballads’ apex (in both editions) is Wordsworth’s great ode in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), ‘Tintern Abbey’ (or, to give it its full original title, ‘Lines, written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’).
Wordsworth has an answer.

He comes across the site of the well and is mystified, concluding only that ‘Here in old time the hand of man hath been’.

After a few more fine lines, the poem returns to the theme we have seen in the Prelude and the ‘Intimations’ Ode—the loss that comes with growth, and the coattendant sense of some consolation which remains, to make quiet the gentle sorrow:Often, Wordsworth’s best poetry proves to be found in those moments in which he fails to say exactly what he wants; in his best work there is a sense of endless yearning and striving. He spent his last couple of decades, after many years of less genial reception (see, for example, Byron’s, Shelley’s, and Keats’ responses to Wordsworth), enjoying his well-earned popularity amongst the early Victorians. Therefore, you will not scruple when a difficult point of Law occurs, to consult me.’Wordsworth possesses one of the most intriguing biographies of all the poets, which is itself indispensable for understanding his poetry. He had many friends in high places, including Queen Victoria herself, and he was awarded honorary degrees by both Durham and Oxford—honours which Wordsworth responded to with dry wit in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (28 July 1838): ‘I forgot to mention that the University of Durham the other day by especial convocation conferred upon me the honorary degree of L.L.D.

We see this in ‘the slow motion of a summer’s cloud’, and then again more forcefully in stanza 3:The poem is in two discrete parts, the first of which relates the tale: Sir Walter relentlessly hunts the hart and finds it dead by a spring after leaping a tremendous distance (which he deduces from the number of hoofprints in the earth).

Not to mention the irony of requiring a written poem to learn this wisdom. We all know that solitude can give bliss, but Wordsworth here offers an insight unique to him and typical of his searching descriptions of experience by making this inward eye the instrument by which we find bliss in solitude—so much so, indeed, that it in fact is the bliss of solitude. In contrast to the decorum of much 18th-century verse, he wanted to relate “situations from common life” in “language really used by men,” embodying “the spontaneous overflow of feelings…recollected in tranquility” (preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]). Wordsworth read copious amounts of eighteenth-century poetry, and there is much of the style of the time—albeit deeply transformed—in his writing, too. 6). She Was a Phantom of Delight by William Wordsworth. Author of