380 Where art thou? Hear I not a voice from thee Which 'tis reproach to hear?1 Anon I rose As if on wings, and saw beneath me stretched Vast prospect of the world which I had been And was; and hence this Song, which like a Lark
385 I have protracted, in the unwearied heavens Singing, and often with more plaintive voice To earth attempered0 and her deep-drawn sighs, adapted Yet centering all in love, and in the end All gratulant,0 if rightly understood.2 joyful
* $ $ Oh! yet a few short years of useful life, And all will be complete, thy3 race be run, Thy monument of glory will be raised;
435 Then, though, too weak to tread the ways of truth, This Age fall back to old idolatry, Though Men return to servitude as fast As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame By Nations sink together,4 we shall still
440 Find solace?knowing what we have learnt to know, Rich in true happiness if allowed to be Faithful alike in forwarding a day Of firmer trust, joint laborers in the Work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe0) grant
445 Of their deliverance, surely yet to come. Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved
1. As he approaches the end, Wordsworth recalls the conclusion of Pope's An Essay on Man 1.291? the beginning of The Prelude. The reproachful 92: 'All discord, harmony not understood; / All par- voice is that which asked the question, 'Was it for tial evil, universal good.' this?' in 1.269ff. 3. Coleridge's. 2. The poet finds that suffering and frustration are 4. I.e., though men?whole nations of them justified when seen as part of the overall design of together?sink to ignominy (disgrace) and shame. the life he has just reviewed. The passage echoes
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D orothy W ordsworth / 38 9 Others will love, and we will teach them how, 450 Instruct them how the mind of Man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this Frame of things (Which 'mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of Men doth still remain unchanged) 455 In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine. 1798-1839 1850
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 1771-1855
Dorothy Wordsworth has an enduring place in English literature even though she wrote almost no word for publication. Not until long after her death did scholars gradually retrieve and print her letters, a few poems, and a series of journals that she kept sporadically between 1798 and 1828 because, she wrote, 'I shall give William Pleasure by it.' It has always been known, from tributes to her by her brother and Coleridge, that she exerted an important influence on the lives and writings of both these men. It is now apparent that she also possessed a power surpassing that of the two poets for precise observation of people and the natural world, together with a genius for terse, luminous, and delicately nuanced description in prose.
Dorothy was born on Christmas Day 1771, twenty-one months after William; she was the only girl of five Wordsworth children. From her seventh year, when her mother died, she lived with various relatives?some of them tolerant and affectionate, others rigid and tyrannical?and saw William and her other brothers only occasionally, during the boys' summer vacations from school. In 1795, when she was twenty- four, an inheritance that William received enabled her to carry out a long-held plan to join her brother in a house at Racedown, and the two spent the rest of their long lives together, first in Dorsetshire and Somersetshire, in the southwest of England, then in their beloved Lake District. She uncomplainingly subordinated her own talents to looking after her brother and his household. She also became William's secretary, tirelessly copying and recopying the manuscripts of his poems to ready them for publication. Despite the scolding of a great-aunt, who deemed 'rambling about .. . on foot' unladylike, she accompanied her brother, too, in vigorous cross-country walks in which they sometimes covered as much as thirty-three miles in a day.
All her adult life she was overworked; after a severe illness in 1835, she suffered a physical and mental collapse. She spent the rest of her existence as an invalid. Hardest for her family to endure was the drastic change in her temperament: from a high- spirited and compassionate woman she became (save for brief intervals of lucidity) querulous, demanding, and at times violent. In this half-life she lingered for twenty years, attended devotedly by William until his death five years before her own in 1855.
Our principal selections are from the journal Dorothy kept in 1798 at Alfoxden, Somersetshire, where the Wordsworths had moved from Racedown to be near Cole- ridge at Nether Stowey, as well as from her journals while at Grasmere (1800?03), with Coleridge residing some thirteen miles away at Greta Hall, Keswick. Her records cover the period when both men emerged as major poets, and in their achievements Dorothy played an indispensable role. In book 11 of The Prelude, William says that in the time of his spiritual crisis, Dorothy 'maintained for me a saving intercourse /
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39 0 / DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
With my true self' and 'preserved me still / A Poet'; in a letter of 1797, Coleridge stressed the delicacy and tact in the responses of William's 'exquisite sister' to the world of sense: 'Her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. . . . Her information various?her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature?and her taste a perfect electrometer?it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties & most recondite faults.'
The verbal sketches of natural scenes given in the journal passages that we reprint are often echoed in Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems. Of at least equal importance for Wordsworth was her chronicling of the busy wayfaring life of rural England. These were exceedingly hard times for country people, when the suffering caused by the displacement of small farms and of household crafts by large-scale farms and industries was aggravated by the economic distress caused by protracted Continental wars (see Wordsworth's comment in The Ruined Cottage, lines 133ff., p. 283). Peddlers, maimed war veterans, leech gatherers, adult and infant beggars, ousted farm families, fugitives, and women abandoned by husbands or lovers streamed along the rural roads and into William's brooding poetic imagination?often by way of Dorothy's prose records.
The journals also show the intensity of Dorothy's love for her brother. Inevitably in our era, the mutual devotion of the orphaned brother and sister has evoked psychoanalytic speculation. It is important to note that Mary Hutchinson, a gentle and openhearted young woman, had been Dorothy's closest friend since childhood, and that Dorothy encouraged William's courtship and marriage, even though she realized that it entailed her own displacement as a focus of her brother's life. All the evidence indicates that their lives in a single household never strained the affectionate relationship between the two women; indeed Dorothy, until she became an invalid, added to her former functions as William's chief support, housekeeper, and scribe a loving ministration to her brother's children.
Because the manuscript of the Alfoxden journal has disappeared, the text printed here is from the transcript published by William Knight in 1897. The selections from the Grasmere journals reproduce Pamela Woof's exact
