The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Volume I Part 3

In the light of what has been said above, and by reference to the Bibliography, it will be seen from these two dates that the original text of 1793--given in the footnote--was continued in the editions of 1820, 1827, and 1832 (it was omitted from the "extract" of 1815); that it was changed in the year 1836; and that this reading was retained in the editions of 1843, 1845, and 1849.

Again, in 'Simon Lee', the lines occur:

But what to them avails the land Which he can till no longer?

And the following are the footnotes:

1845.

But what avails the land to them, Which they can till no longer? 1798.

"But what," saith he, "avails the land, Which I can till no longer? 1827.

But what avails it now, the land Which he can till no longer? 1832.

'Tis his, but what avails the land Which he can till no longer? 1837.

The time, alas! is come when he Can till the land no longer. 1840.

The time is also come when he Can till the land no longer. C.

From this it will be seen that the text adopted in the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads" in 1798 was retained in the editions of 1800, 1802, 1805, 1815, and 1820; that it was altered in each of the editions of 1827, 1832, 1837, 1840, as also in the MS. readings in Lord Coleridge's copy of the works, and in the edition of 1845; and that the version of 1845 was retained in the edition of 1849-50. It should be added that when a verse, or stanza, or line--occurring in one or other of the earlier editions--was omitted from that of 1849, the footnote simply contains the extract along with the date of the year or years in which it occurs; and that, in such cases, the date does not follow the reference number of the footnote, but is placed for obvious reasons at the end of the extract.

The same thing is true of 'Descriptive Sketches'. In the year 1827, there were scarcely any alterations made on the text of the poem, as printed in 1820; still fewer were added in 1832; but for the edition of 1836 the whole was virtually rewritten, and in that state it was finally left, although a few significant changes were made in 1845.

Slight changes of spelling which occur in the successive editions, are not mentioned. When, however, the change is one of transposition, although the text remains unaltered,--as is largely the case in 'Simon Lee', for example--it is always indicated.

It will be further observed that, at the beginning of every poem, two dates are given; the first, on the left-hand side, is the date of composition; the second, on the right-hand side, is the date of the first publication. In what cla.s.s the poem first appeared, and the changes (if any) which subsequently occurred in its t.i.tle, are mentioned in the note appended.

THIRD. In the present edition several suggested changes of text, which were written by Wordsworth on the margin of a copy of his edition of 1836-7, which he kept beside him at Rydal Mount, are published. These MS. notes seem to have been written by himself, or dictated to others, at intervals between the years 1836 and 1850, and they are thus a record of pa.s.sing thoughts, or "moods of his own mind," during these years.

Some of these were afterwards introduced into the editions of 1842, 1846, and 1849; others were not made use of. The latter have now a value of their own, as indicating certain new phases of thought and feeling, in Wordsworth's later years. I owe my knowledge of them, and the permission to use them, to the kindness of the late Chief Justice of England, Lord Coleridge. The following is an extract from a letter from him:

"FOX GHYLL, AMBLESIDE, '4th October 1881'.

"I have been long intending to write you as to the ma.n.u.script notes and alterations in Wordsworth's poems, which you have had the opportunity of seeing, and, so far as you thought fit, of using for your edition. They came into my possession in this way. I saw them advertised in a catalogue which was sent me, and at my request the book was very courteously forwarded to me for my inspection. It appeared to me of sufficient interest and value to induce me to buy it; and I accordingly became the purchaser.

"It is a copy of the edition in six volumes, the publication of which began in the year 1836; and of the volume containing the collected sonnets, which was afterwards printed uniformly with that edition. It appears to have been the copy which Wordsworth himself used for correcting, altering, and adding to the poems contained in it. As you have seen, in some of the poems the Alterations are very large, amounting sometimes to a complete rewriting of considerable pa.s.sages.

Many of these alterations have been printed in subsequent editions; some have not; two or three small poems, as far as I know, have not been hitherto published. Much of the writing is Wordsworth's own; but perhaps the larger portion is the hand-writing of others, one or more, not familiar to me as Wordsworth's is.

"How the volumes came to be sold I do not know.... Such as they are, and whatever be their interest or value, you are, as far as I am concerned, heartily welcome to them; and I shall be glad indeed if they add in the least degree to make your edition more worthy of the great man for whom my admiration grows every day I live, and my deep grat.i.tude to whom will cease only with my life, and my reason."

This precious copy of the edition of 1836-7 is now the property of Lady Coleridge. I re-examined it in 1894, and added several readings, which I had omitted to note twelve years ago, when Lord Coleridge first showed it to me. I should add that, since the issue of the volumes of 1882-6, many other MS. copies of individual Poems have come under my notice; and that every important variation of text in them is incorporated in this edition.

As it is impossible to discover the precise year in which the suggested alterations of text were written by Wordsworth, on the margin of the edition of 1836, they will be indicated, wherever they occur, by the initial letter C. Comparatively few changes occur in the poems of early years.

A copy of the 1814 (quarto) edition of 'The Excursion', now in the possession of a grandson of the poet, the Rev. John Wordsworth, Gosforth Rectory, c.u.mberland--which was the copy Wordsworth kept at Rydal Mount for annotation and correction, much in the same way as he kept the edition of 1836-7--has also been kindly sent to me by its present owner, for examination and use in this edition; and, in it, I have found some additional readings.

FOURTH. In the present edition all the Notes and Memoranda, explanatory of the Poems, which Wordsworth dictated to Miss Fenwick, are given in full. Miss Fenwick lived much at Rydal Mount, during the later years of the Poet's life; and it is to their friendship, and to her inducing Wordsworth to dictate these Notes, that we owe most of the information we possess, as to the occasions and circ.u.mstances under which his poems were composed. These notes were first made use of--although only in a fragmentary manner--by the late Bishop of Lincoln, in the 'Memoirs' of his uncle. They were afterwards incorporated in full in the edition of 1857, issued by Mr. Moxon, under the direction of Mr. Carter; and in the centenary edition. They were subsequently printed in 'The Prose Works of Wordsworth', edited by Dr. Grosart; and in my edition of 1882-6. I am uncertain whether it was the original MS., written by Miss Fenwick, or the copy of it afterwards taken for Miss Quillinan, to which Dr. Grosart had access. The text of these Notes, as printed in the edition of 1857, is certainly (in very many cases) widely different from what is given in 'The Prose Works' of 1876. I have made many corrections--from the MS.

which I have examined with care--of errors which exist in all previously printed copies of these Notes, including my own.

What appears in this volume is printed from a MS., which Miss Quillinan gave me to examine and copy, and which she a.s.sured me was the original one. The proper place for these Fenwick Notes is doubtless that which was a.s.signed to them by the editor of 1857, viz. before the poems which they respectively ill.u.s.trate.

FIFTH. Topographical Notes, explanatory of the allusions made by Wordsworth to the localities in the English Lake District, and elsewhere, are added throughout the volumes. This has already been attempted to some extent by several writers, but a good deal more remains to be done; and I may repeat what I wrote on this subject, in 1878.

Many of Wordsworth's allusions to Place are obscure, and the exact localities difficult to identify. It is doubtful if he cared whether they could be afterwards traced out or not; and in reference to one particular rock, referred to in the "Poems on the Naming of Places,"

when asked by a friend to localise it, he declined; replying to the question, "Yes, that--or any other that will suit!" There is no doubt that, in many instances, his allusions to place are intentionally vague; and, in some of his most realistic pa.s.sages, he avowedly weaves together a description of localities remote from each other.

It is true that "Poems of Places" are not meant to be photographs; and were they simply to reproduce the features of a particular district, and be an exact transcript of reality, they would be literary photographs, and not poems. Poetry cannot, in the nature of things, be a mere register of phenomena appealing to the eye or the ear. No imaginative writer, however, in the whole range of English Literature, is so peculiarly identified with locality as Wordsworth is; and there is not one on the roll of poets, the appreciation of whose writings is more aided by an intimate knowledge of the district in which he lived. The wish to be able to identify his allusions to those places, which he so specially interpreted, is natural to every one who has ever felt the spell of his genius; and it is indispensable to all who would know the special charm of a region, which he described as "a national property,"

and of which he, beyond all other men, may be said to have effected the literary "conveyance" to posterity.

But it has been asked--and will doubtless be asked again--what is the use of a minute identification of all these places? Is not the general fact that Wordsworth described this district of mountain, vale, and mere, sufficient, without any further attempt at localisation? The question is more important, and has wider bearings, than appears upon the surface.

It must be admitted, on the one hand, that the discovery of the precise point in every local allusion is not necessary to an understanding or appreciation of the Poems. But, it must be remembered, on the other hand, that Wordsworth was never contented with simply copying what he saw in Nature. Of the 'Evening Walk'--written in his eighteenth year--he says that the plan of the poem

"has not been confined to a particular walk or an individual place; a proof (of which I was unconscious at the time) of my unwillingness to submit the poetic spirit to the chains of fact and real circ.u.mstance.

The country is idealised rather than described in any one of its local aspects."[13]

Again, he says of the 'Lines written while Sailing in a Boat at Evening':

"It was during a solitary walk on the banks of the Cam that I was first struck with this appearance, and applied it to my own feelings in the manner here expressed, changing the scene to the Thames, near Windsor"; [14]

and of 'Guilt and Sorrow', he said,

"To obviate some distraction in the minds of those who are well acquainted with Salisbury Plain, it may be proper to say, that of the features described as belonging to it, one or two are taken from other desolate parts of England." [15]

In 'The Excursion' he pa.s.ses from Langdale to Grasmere, over to Patterdale, back to Grasmere, and again to Hawes Water, without warning; and even in the case of the "Duddon Sonnets" he introduces a description taken direct from Rydal. Mr. Aubrey de Vere tells of a conversation he had with Wordsworth, in which he vehemently condemned the ultra-realistic poet, who goes to Nature with

"pencil and note-book, and jots down whatever strikes him most,"

adding, "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms!

He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Afterwards he would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. _That which remained, the picture surviving in his mind, would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic._ In every scene, many of the most brilliant details are but accidental."

The two last sentences of this extract give admirable expression to one feature of Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature. In the deepest poetry, as in the loftiest music,--in Wordsworth's lyrics as in Beethoven's sonatas--it is by what they unerringly suggest and not by what they exhaustively express that their truth and power are known. "In what he leaves unsaid," wrote Schiller, "I discover the master of style." It depends, no doubt, upon the vision of the "inward eye," and the reproductive power of the idealising mind, whether the result is a travesty of Nature, or the embodiment of a truth higher than Nature yields. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the identification of localities casts a sudden light in many instances upon obscure pa.s.sages in a poem, and is by far the best commentary that can be given.

It is much to be able to compare the actual scene, with the ideal creation suggested by it; as the latter was both Wordsworth's reading of the text of Nature, and his interpretation of it. In his seventy-third year, he said, looking back on his 'Evening Walk', that there was not an image in the poem which he had not observed, and that he "recollected the time and place where most of them were noted." In the Fenwick notes, we constantly find him saying, "the fact occurred strictly as recorded,"

"the fact was as mentioned in the poem"; and the fact very often involved the accessories of place.

Any one who has tried to trace out the allusions in the "Poems on the Naming of Places," or to discover the site of "Michael's Sheepfold," to identify "Ghimmer Crag," or "Thurston-Mere,"--not to speak of the individual "rocks" and "recesses" near Blea Tarn at the head of Little Langdale so minutely described in 'The Excursion',--will admit that local commentary is an important aid to the understanding of Wordsworth.

If to read the 'Yew Trees' in Borrowdale itself,

in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves,

to read 'The Brothers' in Ennerdale, or "The Daffodils" by the sh.o.r.e of Ullswater, gives a new significance to these "poems of the imagination,"

a discovery of the obscurer allusions to place or scene will deepen our appreciation of those pa.s.sages in which his idealism is most p.r.o.nounced.

Every one knows Kirkstone Pa.s.s, Aira Force, Dungeon Ghyll, the Wishing Gate, and Helm Crag: many persons know the Glowworm Rock, and used to know the Rock of Names; but where is "Emma's Dell"? or "the meeting point of two highways," so characteristically described in the twelfth book of 'The Prelude'? and who will fix the site of the pool in Rydal Upper Park, immortalised in the poem 'To M. H.'? or identify "Joanna's Rock"? Many of the places in the English Lake District are undergoing change, and every year the local allusions will be more difficult to trace. Perhaps the most interesting memorial of the poet which existed, viz. the "Rock of Names," on the sh.o.r.e of Thirlmere, is now sunk under the waters of a Manchester reservoir. Other memorials are perishing by the wear and tear of time, the decay of old buildings, the alteration of roads, the cutting down of trees, and the modernising, or "improving,"

of the district generally. All this is inevitable. But it is well that many of the natural objects, over and around which the light of Wordsworth's genius lingers, are out of the reach of "improvements," and are indestructible even by machinery.