opened with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and included three other poems by Coleridge, some lyrics in which Words- worth celebrated the experience of nature, and a number of verse anecdotes drawn from the lives of the rural poor. (The verse forms and the subject matter of this last set of poems?which includes 'Simon Lee,' 'We Are Seven,' and 'The Thorn'? make evident the debt, announced in the very title of Lyrical Ballads, that Wordsworth's and Coleridge's book owed to the folk ballads that were being transcribed and anthologized in the later eighteenth century by collectors such as Thomas Percy and Robert Burns.) The book closed with Wordsworth's great descriptive and meditative poem in blank verse, 'Tintern Abbey.' This poem inaugurated what modern critics call Wordsworth's 'myth of nature': his presentation of the 'growth' of his mind to maturity, a process unfolding through the interaction between the inner world of the mind and the shaping force of external Nature.
William Hazlitt said that when he heard Coleridge read some of the newly written poems of Lyrical Ballads aloud, 'the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me,' with something of the effect 'that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring.' The reviewers were less enthusiastic, warning that, because of their simple language and subject matter, poems such as 'Simon Lee' risked 'vulgarity' or silliness. Nevertheless Lyrical Ballads sold out in two years, and Wordsworth published under his own name a new edition, dated 1800, to which he added a second volume of poems. In his famous Preface to this edition, planned in close consultation with Coleridge, Wordsworth outlined a critical program that provided a retroactive rationale for the 'experiments' the poems represented.
Late in 1799 William and Dorothy moved back permanently to their native lakes, settling at Grasmere in the little house later named Dove Cottage. Coleridge, following them, rented at Keswick, thirteen miles away. In 1802 Wordsworth finally came into his father's inheritance and, after an amicable settlement with Annette Vallon, married Mary Hutchinson, whom he had known since childhood. His life after that time had many sorrows: the drowning in 1805 of his favorite brother, John, a sea captain; the death in 1812 of two of his and Mary's five children; a growing rift with Coleridge, culminating in a bitter quarrel (1810) from which they were not completely reconciled for almost two decades; and, from the 1830s on, Dorothy's physical and mental illness. Over these years Wordsworth became, nonetheless, increasingly prosperous and famous. He also displayed a political and religious conservatism that disappointed readers who, like Hazlitt, had interpreted his early work as the expression of a 'levelling Muse' that promoted democratic change. In 1813a government sinecure, the position of stamp distributor (that is, revenue collector) for Westmorland, was bestowed on him?concrete evidence of his recognition as a national poet and of the alteration in the government's perception of his politics. Gradually, Wordsworth's residences, as he moved into more and more comfortable quarters, became standard stops for sightseers touring the Lakes. By 1843 he was poet laureate of Great
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Britain. He died in 1850 at the age of eighty. Only then did his executors publish his masterpiece, The Prelude, the autobiographical poem that he had written in two parts in 1799, expanded to its full length in 1805, and then continued to revise almost to the last decade of his long life.
Most of Wordsworth's greatest poetry had been written by 1807, when he published Poems, in Two Volumes; and after The Excursion (1814) and the first collected edition of his poems (1815), although he continued to write prolifically, his powers appeared to decline. The causes of that decline have been much debated. One seems to be inherent in the very nature of his writing. Wordsworth is above all the poet of the remembrance of things past or, as he put it, of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity.' Some object or event in the present triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he had experienced in youth; the result is a poem exhibiting the discrepancy between what Wordsworth called 'two consciousnesses': himself as he is now and himself as he once was. But the memory of one's early emotional experience is not an inexhaustible resource for poetry, as Wordsworth recognized. He said in The Prelude 12, while describing the recurrence of 'spots of time' from his memories of childhood:
The days gone by Beturn upon me almost from the dawn Of life: the hiding places of Man's power Open; I would approach them, but they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all.
The past that Wordsworth recollected was one of moments of intense experience, and of emotional turmoil that is ordered, in the calmer present, into a hard-won equilibrium. As time went on, however, he gained what, in the 'Ode to Duty' (composed in 1804), he longed for, 'a repose which ever is the same'?but at the expense of the agony and excitation that, under the calm surface, empower his best and most characteristic poems.
Occasionally in his middle and later life a jolting experience would revive the intensity of Wordsworth's remembered emotion, and also his earlier poetic strength. The moving sonnet 'Surprised by Joy,' for example, was written in his forties at the abrupt realization that time was beginning to diminish his grief at the death some years earlier of his little daughter Catherine. And when Wordsworth was sixty-five years old, the sudden report of the death of James Hogg called up the memory of other poets whom Wordsworth had loved and outlived; the result was his 'Extempore Effusion,' in which he returns to the simple quatrains of the early Lyrical Ballads and recovers the elegiac voice that had mourned Lucy, thirty-five years before.
FROM LYRICAL BALLADS
Simon Lee1
The Old Huntsman
WITH AN INCIDENT IN WHICH HE WAS CONCERNED
In the sweet shire of Cardigan,2 Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
1. This old man had been huntsman to the [Wordsworth's note, 1843]. Wordsworth and Squires of Alfoxden. .. . I have, after an interval of Dorothy had lived at Alfoxden House, Somer45 years, the image of the old man as fresh before setshire, in 1797-98. my eyes as if I had seen him yesterday. The expres-2. Wordsworth relocates the incident from Somersion when the hounds were out, 'I dearly love their setshire to Cardiganshire in Wales. voices,' was word for word from his own lips
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24 6 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
An old man dwells, a little man,-? 'Tis said he once was tall.
Full five-and-thirty years he lived A running huntsman3 merry; And still the centre of his cheek Is red as a ripe cherry.
No man like him the horn could sound,
And hill and valley rang with glee When Echo bandied, round and round, The halloo of Simon Lee. In those proud days, he little cared For husbandry or tillage;
To blither tasks did Simon rouse The sleepers of the village.
