WILLIAM WORDSWORTH   (1770-1850)

The Seven Sisters
The Faëry Chasm
Lucy Gray
Song For The Spinning Wheel
"The world is too much with us; late and soon"
The Haunted Tree

William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, into a old English family. His childhood was spent in the family home on the River Derwent. However, when he was seven years old, his mother died, and he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire while his sister Dorothy, who was to become his constant companion in adulthood, was sent to live with relatives. When Wordsworth was thirteen, his father died as well. After grammar school, where he learned Latin, Greek, and mathematics, Wordsworth attended St. John's College, Cambridge. He was an undistinguished student, preferring to study on his own. He had developed a love of the natural world in Lancashire, where he had spent hours roaming over the countryside with friends, gathering nuts and stealing birds' eggs. At Cambridge, he spent his holidays taking walking tours on the continent and discovering the sublime scenery of the Alps.
           In 1791, Wordsworth travelled to France. Like other idealistic young men of the time, he had been inspired by the French Revolution and was eager to participate in the creation of a government that embodied the ideals of liberty and equality. In France, he fell in love with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a surgeon, who bore him a daughter, Caroline. He was summoned back to England by disapproving relatives, who cut off advances on his inheritance and forbade him from meeting with Dorothy. Although Wordsworth expressed his intention of marrying Annette and legitimizing their daughter, the declaration of war between England and France make further contact impossible. He was not to see his daughter again until 1802.
           In 1793, Wordsworth published two poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Although he was still a republican, associating with radical figures such as William Godwin, Mary Wollestonecraft, and Thomas Paine, he was already becoming disillusioned with the increasing violence in France. In 1795, after receiving a legacy from a friend, he took Dorothy to live with him at Racedown in Dorsetshire. In 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to visit. This meeting formed the starting point of the two poets' literary collaboration. A few months later, Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden, an estate in Somerset, to be near Coleridge, who was living at Nether Stowey. The following year was spent by Wordsworth and Coleridge in close communion, working on their book of poems, Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798. After the lease on Alfoxden expired, Wordsworth and his sister moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and Coleridge settled nearby. In 1800, an expanded edition of Lyrical Ballads was published, with a preface by Wordsworth explaining the poetic philosophy of the two poets. Although Lyrical Ballads was to become one of the most important documents of romanticism, it was not well received by critics, and the public paid it almost no attention.
           The years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads were a productive time for Wordsworth, during which he wrote some of his most important poems and formed friendships with figures such as Sir Walter Scott and Thomas De Quincey. In 1802 he visited Caroline and arranged for her support, but never fulfilled his original intention of marrying Annette. Instead, that same year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, with whom he was to have five children. His second book of poems, Poems in Two Volumes, was published in 1807. In 1810 he became estranged from Coleridge. Although the two poets were to reconcile several years later, they would never again have the close friendship and collaborative relationship that they had once enjoyed. As he grew older, Wordsworth slowly abandoned the radicalism of his youth. In 1813, he accepted the government post of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland and moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he was to live with his wife and sister for the rest of his life. He also became increasingly popular, publishing numerous books of poetry: The Excursion (1814), The White Doe of Rylstone and Miscellaneous Poems (1815); Peter Bell and The Waggoner (1819); Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835); and Poems Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842). In 1842 he received a Civil List pension and resigned as Distributor of Stamps. The following year he succeeded Robert Southey as Poet Laureate. He died at Rydal Mount after the publication of a six-volume edition of his collected poems. The Prelude, an autobiographical account of his poetic development, was published posthumously in 1850.
           Wordsworth is not generally considered a poet of the fantastic. When Wordsworth and Coleridge planned their collaboration on Lyrical Ballads, they agreed that Coleridge would write about the romantic and supernatural, while Wordsworth would concentrate on describing scenes of ordinary life. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that his aim had been to "choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate and describe them, throughout, in a selection of language really used by men." This fidelity to ordinary experience in both language and subject matter remained his poetic goal. Although all of the poems included here contain a reference to the fantastic, in most the fantastic exists only as folktale or superstition. Fishermen claim that fairies have buried the seven sisters of Binnorie on seven islands, and inhabitants of the moor insist that Lucy Gray continues to walk through the countryside, but in both "The Seven Sisters" and "Lucy Gray" the fantastic event appears only as legend. The fairy assistance described in "Song for the Spinning Wheel" is simply an old belief. However, Wordsworth also mourns the passing of an ancient magic, symbolized in "The Faëry Chasm" by dangerous but enchanting fairy music, and in "The world is too much with us; late and soon" by the creatures of classical mythology. Wordsworth manages to locate this magic again, but he does so among the scenes of ordinary life and in the natural world, where it exists as a constant spiritual presence. In Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey he writes of his early wanderings "Wherever nature led,"

                              And 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 suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Although this description contains no fairies, ghosts, or haunted trees, it expresses the essentially fantastic nature of reality itself.
 
THE SEVEN SISTERS;
or, The Solitude of Binnorie

                         I.

Seven Daughters had Lord Archibald,
All children of one mother:
You could not say in one short day
What love they bore each other.
A garland, of seven lilies, wrought!
Seven Sisters that together dwell;
But he, bold Knight as ever fought,
Their Father, took of them no thought,
He loved the wars so well.
Sing, mournfully, oh! mournfully,
The solitude of Binnorie!

                         II.

Fresh blows the wind, a western wind,
And from the shores of Erin,
Across the wave, a Rover brave
To Binnorie is steering:
Right onward to the Scottish strand
The gallant ship is borne;
The warriors leap upon the land,
And hark! the Leader of the band
Hath blown his bugle horn.
Sing, mournfully, oh! mournfully,
The solitude of Binnorie.

                         III.

Beside a grotto of their own,
With boughs above them closing,
The Seven are laid, and in the shade
They lie like fawns reposing.
But now, upstarting with affright
At noise of man and steed,
Away they fly to left, to right –
Of your fair household, Father-knight,
Methinks you take small heed!
Sing, mournfully, oh! mournfully,
The solitude of Binnorie.

                         IV.

Away the seven fair Campbells fly,
And, over hill and hollow,
With menace proud, and insult loud,
The youthful Rovers follow.
Cried they, "Your Father loves to roam:
Enough for him to find
The empty house when he comes home;
For us your yellow ringlets comb,
For us be fair and kind!"
Sing, mournfully, oh! mournfully,
The solitude of Binnorie.

                         V.

Some close behind, some side to side,
Like clouds in stormy weather;
They run, and cry, "Nay, let us die,
And let us die together."
A lake was near; the shore was steep;
There never foot had been;
They ran, and with a desperate leap
Together plunged into the deep,
Nor ever more were seen.
Sing, mournfully, oh! mournfully,
The solitude of Binnorie.

                         VI.

The stream that flows out of the lake,
As through the glen it rambles,
Repeats a moan o'er moss and stone,
For those seven lovely Campbells.
Seven little Islands, green and bare,
Have risen from out the deep:
The fishers say, those sisters fair,
By faeries all are buried there,
And there together sleep.
Sing, mournfully, oh! mournfully,
The solitude of Binnorie.
 
THE FAËRY CHASM

No fiction was it of the antique age:
A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft,
Is of the very footmarks unbereft
Which tiny Elves impressed; – on that smooth stage
Dancing with all their brilliant equipage
In secret revels – haply after theft
Of some sweet Babe – Flower stolen, and coarse Weed left
For the distracted Mother to assuage
Her grief with, as she might! – But, where, oh! where
Is traceable a vestige of the notes
That ruled those dances wild in character? –
Deep underground? Or in the upper air,
On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats
O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer?
 
LUCY GRAY
or, Solitude

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
– The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!

You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.

"To-night will be a stormy night –
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow."

"That, Father! will I gladly do:
'Tis scarcely afternoon –
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!"

At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a faggot-band;
He plied his work; – and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.

They wept – and, turning homeward, cried,
"In heaven we all shall meet;"
– When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!

– Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
 
SONG FOR THE SPINNING WHEEL
Founded Upon a Belief Prevalent Among the Pastoral Vales of Westmoreland

Swiftly turn the murmuring wheel!
Night has brought the welcome hour,
When the weary fingers feel
Help, as if from faery power;
Dewy night o'ershades the ground;
Turn the swift wheel round and round!

Now, beneath the starry sky,
Couch the widely-scattered sheep; –
Ply the pleasant labour, ply!
For the spindle, while they sleep,
Runs with speed more smooth and fine,
Gathering up a trustier line.

Short-lived likings may be bred
By a glance from fickle eyes;
But true love is like the thread
Which the kindly wool supplies,
When the flocks are all at rest
Sleeping on the mountain's breast.
 
"The world is too much with us; late and soon"

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. – Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
 
THE HAUNTED TREE
To —

Those silver clouds collected round the sun
His mid-day warmth abate not, seeming less
To overshade than multiply his beams
By soft reflection – grateful to the sky,
To rocks, fields, woods. Nor doth our human sense
Ask, for its pleasure, screen or canopy
More ample than the time-dismantled Oak
Spreads o'er this tuft of heath, which now, attired
In the whole fulness of its bloom, affords
Couch beautiful as e'er for earthly use
Was fashioned; whether, by the hand of Art,
That eastern Sultan, amid flowers enwrought
On silken tissue, might diffuse his limbs
In languor; or, by Nature, for repose
Of panting Wood-nymph, wearied with the chase.
O Lady! fairer in thy Poet's sight
Than fairest spiritual creature of the groves,
Approach; – and, thus invited, crown with rest
The noon-tide hour: though truly some there are
Whose footsteps superstitiously avoid
This venerable Tree; for, when the wind
Blows keenly, it sends forth a creaking sound
(Above the general roar of woods and crags)
Distinctly heard from far – a doleful note!
As if (so Grecian shepherds would have deemed)
The Hamadryad, pent within, bewailed
Some bitter wrong. Nor is it unbelieved,
By ruder fancy, that a troubled ghost
Haunts the old trunk; lamenting deeds of which
The flowery ground is conscious. But no wind
Sweeps now along this elevated ridge;
Not even a zephyr stirs; – the obnoxious Tree
Is mute; and, in his silence, would look down,
O lovely Wanderer of the trackless hills,
On thy reclining form with more delight
Than his coevals in the sheltered vale
Seem to participate, the while they view
Their own far-stretching arms and leafy heads
Vividly pictured in some glassy pool,
That, for a brief space, checks the hurrying stream!