Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 by Geoffrey Hartman

Author:Geoffrey Hartman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1964-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

8. 1801–1807: The Major Lyrics

The years that followed the second edition of Lyrical Ballads were not immediately taken up by Wordsworth’s ‘poem on his own life,’ but saw the appearance of many short and middle-sized lyrics. Coleridge, in fact, lamented that his friend should squander himself on occasional poetry: “Of nothing but ‘The Recluse’ can I hear patiently.”1 It was not till the beginning of 1804 that Wordsworth resumed his long poem with enough zest and vigor to complete it by June of the following year.

The lyrics composed between 1801 and 1807 were gathered in a collection called Poems in Two Volumes (1807). Here some of Wordsworth’s most familiar pieces are found: poems on the Solitary Reaper, the Cuckoo, the Daisy, the Daffodils; ‘ballads’ on Alice Fell and the Sailor’s Mother; the better-known sonnets, and such larger-scaled lyrics as “Resolution and Independence” and the Intimations Ode. It would be wrong to treat this collection as a natural unity. It is, as the title indicates, a composite volume written over a number of years and with no single aim. In this it differs from the Lyrical Ballads, many of which, composed in one fervid year, are consciously innovative. Yet the Poems of 1807 do have some distinguishing characteristics, and many of them were actually composed in a short period of time, the spring of 1802.1 propose to consider individually, yet in the approximate order of their composition, several of the poems spanning the period between the 1800 Lyrical Ballads and the Poems of 1807, hoping to salvage some gradations that would be lost if the two collections were compared only generally.

“Michael”

“Michael,” the last poem to enter Lyrical Ballads, was finished in December 1800, and is one of Wordsworth’s great poems of fortitude. It can set the tone for the group of lyrics on which our consideration will center: “Resolution and Independence” (1802), the Intimations Ode (1802–04), the “Ode to Duty” (1804) and the “Elegiac Stanzas … on Peele Castle” (1805 or 1806). “Michael” is somewhat of an anomaly, for it might have been as appropriate for The Prelude as for Lyrical Ballads. It is a ‘ballad’ in that it begins with a heap of stones with which no one but Wordsworth could have shaped a story, is unenriched by strange events, and intends to delight only a few “natural hearts.” Forty lines of prologue apologize mildly for its “homely” and “rude” character. Yet the prologue also resembles those frames of authorial comment in The Prelude which allow episodes to point their own meaning yet link them thematically to the growth of a poet’s mind. “Michael” may have been conceived as Wordsworth was thinking back to his youth and composing drafts for the poem on his own life. It supplements Book V of The Prelude and covers the time when children, though still careless of books, begin to develop their sympathetic imaginations by listening to tales like “Michael.”

As in “The Thorn,” Wordsworth opens in the person of a guide who leads us to a strangely inhuman place (a heap of stones) which his story humanizes.

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