The Life of William Wordsworth by John Worthen

Author:John Worthen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

Grasmere was not simply a place which encouraged Wordsworth to write poems and pastorals. It reminded him not only of what others had lost, but of what he too had lost. We cannot know for certain when the “Ode” was written, nor what its text was like before 1804;39 the date of 1802–4 normally given to it is a conclusion drawn from three facts.

On March 27, 1802, Wordsworth wrote “part of an ode” at breakfast, which has been assumed to be the start of the poem.

On June 17, 1802, “William added a little to the Ode he is writing.”

In 1843, Wordsworth said that “two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas” (“at Town-End”) and “the remaining part.”40

But there are extraordinary links between the opening stanza of the “Ode” and a poem “The Voice from the Side of Etna,” published in the Morning Post on October 13, 1800, at a time when Wordsworth was regularly helping Coleridge; the latter was going through a phase when he found producing publishable material more and more difficult. His illnesses, procrastinations, broken promises, and inability to meet his obligations (producing poems for Stuart, for example) were linked with the early stages of the addiction which would increasingly damage him. The Morning Post poem contains the following second stanza:

There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies, The bright green vale and forest's dark recess, When all things lay before my eyes In steady loveliness. But now I feel on earth's uneasy scene Such motions as will never cease! I only ask for peace – Then wherefore must I know, that such a time has been?41

In line with Coleridge's practice of assigning pseudonyms to poems taken over from Wordsworth,42 the poem appeared over the pseudonym “CASSIANI, jun.,” probably with reference to St. John Cassianus (c. 360–435), famous for his sojourns in desert monasteries—and Coleridge, of course, thought of Wordsworth as “the Recluse.”43 We only have to put those lines alongside the opening stanza of the “Ode” as it was in March 1804 to see the similarities:

There was a time when meadow grove and stream The earth and every common sight To me did seem Apparell'd in celestial light The glory and the freshness of a dream It is not now as it has been of yore Turn wheresoe'er I may By night or day The things which I have seen I see them now no more

(P2V 361:1–9)

The opening stanza of what later became the “Ode,” with its striking twelve-syllable last line, was clearly either written before, or developed from “The Voice from the Side of Etna”; the link is too close to be ignored. In the autumn of 1800, too, Wordsworth would describe “the principal requisites” of an Ode (its “transitions” and “the impassioned music of the versification”44) at a time when he had never apparently applied himself to one. Perhaps he had. The seasonal allusions in the first part of the “Ode” suggest those which may have been in Wordsworth's mind when he started it, either in 1800 or in 1802.

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