94-98. These lines are the result of several revisions. 1820 we have a text far inferior in beauty : Green with the moss of years; a pensive sight That moved my heart!- recalling former days Who lived within these walls, at my approach, In 1814 and 165. Her dwelling in 1827 replaced "his dwelling." Several like changes in the sex of birds may be noticed in Wordsworth's revision of his poems. 175. Amusing means distracting — diverting him from melancholy. 176. Mingled in 1837 replaced the less correct "blended" of earlier texts. 197. Tuneful hum is a late correction, 1845; in earlier texts, "Is filling all the air with melody." Wordsworth perceived that "melody" is not a happy word to describe the murmur of flies. At the same time, in the next line, "cheek" replaced "eye." 247. In edd. 1814 and 1820 the Old Man does not lift the latch, but, on reaching the door, knocks. His confidence in the later reading enhances the surprise of sorrow. 303. "Trotting brooks," from Burns's "To William Simpson," "Adoun some trottin' burn's meander." 307. In edd. 1814 and 1820," Towards the wane of Summer; when the wheat" 344. Dull red stains caused by the "reddle," with which the several owners of sheep on the common had marked their animals. 374. God in 1832 replaced "heaven." 415. When: a late alteration, 1845; previously "Ere," making the wanderer's visit earlier in the year; compare note on 1. 307, where a change of the opposite kind was made. In each instance the season is made more joyous than as at first conceived. 534-540, and also 552-555, changes were made, late in Wordsworth's life, in 1845, to give clearer expression to his Christian faith. Before that date two lines stood in the place of 534-540: Be wise and chearful; and no longer read And for 552-555 stood : Appeared an idle dream, that could not live THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN. ९९ Dated by Wordsworth, 1797, and published in 1800. "This arose," said Wordsworth, "out of my observations of the affecting music of these birds hanging in this way in the London streets during the freshness and stillness of the Spring morning." Until 1815 the name was "Poor Susan." In a note in that edition (vol. I, p. 329) Wordsworth describes it as strictly a Reverie," and says that it would not have been placed among "Poems of the Imagination" except to avoid a needless multiplication of classes among his poems. The noteworthy changes of text are two: in 1. 2, " Hangs" was substituted in 1820 for "There's"; and in 1802 a stanza, which closed the poem in 1800, was judiciously omitted. Poor Outcast! return - to receive thee once more The house of thy Father will open its door, And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown, May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. Myers speaks of Wordsworth as "the poet not of London considered as London, but of London considered as a part of the country." In a letter of 1815, from Lamb to Wordsworth (Lamb's Letters, ed. Ainger, I, 286), he speaks of "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale" as a charming counterpart to Poor Susan"; Susan stood for the representative of poor Rus in urbe. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her 'a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away." I. Wood Street, off Cheapside, London. 7. Lothbury, a street behind the Bank of England. A NIGHT PIECE. The date is Jan. 25, 1798, when Dorothy Wordsworth writes in her Journal," Went to Poole's after tea. The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp; their brightness seemed concentrated.” Perhaps Dorothy's words did not suggest, but were derived from the poem, for Wordsworth, in 1843, said that it was composed extempore on the road, —" I distinctly recollect the very moment when I was struck, as described." Lines in Coleridge's "Christabel" may have been suggested on the same occasion (or possibly on Jan. 31; see Dorothy's Journal) : The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full ; And yet she looks both small and dull. Compare the sonnet beginning "The shepherd looking eastward,” and that beginning "With how sad steps, O Moon," as other "Night Pieces" of Wordsworth in which the play of clouds around the moon, its sudden brightness, and the hurrying and sparkling stars are described. 13. Note the happy fall of the accent on clear" and "glory." ९९ WE ARE SEVEN. This poem was composed in 1798, while Wordsworth was walking in the grove at Alfoxden, and was published in the same year in " Lyrical Ballads." "I composed," said Wordsworth, "the last stanza first, having begun with the last line." When it was all but finished, he recited the poem to his sister Dorothy and Coleridge, and expressed his desire to add a prefatory stanza. Coleridge immediately threw off the first stanza, beginning with the line, "A little child, dear brother Jem." Wordsworth objected to " Jem," but they all enjoyed "hitching in" the name of a friend who was familiarly called Jem, and until 1815 the first line remained "A simple child, dear brother Jim." The little girl who is the heroine had been met by Wordsworth within the area of Goodrich Castle, upon his visit to the river Wye, in 1793. The text was little altered. In 1. 49 "little Jane" stood in place of "sister Jane" until 1836; the word "little" had occurred in 1. 47, and perhaps Wordsworth thought that one small child would hardly speak of another as "little." L. 54 until 1827 was " And all the summer dry." L. 63, "Quick was the little maid's reply" (1836), gains on the earlier "The little Maiden did reply" in vigour of meaning and of expression. The idea of the poem - the incapacity of a child to conceive of death - has much in common with the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood." The opening stanza attributes this incapacity to the child's vivid sense of physical life. The "Ode" discovers other and deeper causes; and perhaps the best comment on this poem may be found in Wordsworth's "Essay on Epitaphs," in which he maintains that the inability of children to realise the thought of death proceeds from a higher source than mere ignorance or animal vivacity: "Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow, or any other irrational creature is endowed." (The passage is too long to quote in full.) SIMON LEE. Written in 1798, and published in the same year. This Old Man," says Wordsworth, "had been huntsman to the squires of Alfoxden, which, at the time we occupied it, belonged to a minor. The Old Man's cottage stood upon the common, a little way from the entrance to Alfoxden Park. . . . The expression when the hounds were out, I dearly love their voice,' was word for word from his own lips." No poem of Wordsworth's underwent so many and perplexing changes as Simon Lee." The last five stanzas, indeed, were little altered; but the first seven, which nearly reached their final form in 1832, are found in different texts and different sequence in 1798, 1802, 1820, 1827, 1832. Condensation was effected, words and lines were altered, stanzas were shifted in position, and new stanzas were constructed by connecting the halves of certain stanzas with the halves of others. It would hardly be profitable to trace here all these curious changes; they will be found recorded in my edition of Wordsworth in the Aldine Poets. I shall here do no more than give the earliest form of those stanzas which were most considerably rehandled : In the sweet shire of Cardigan, No doubt a burthen weighty; He says he is three score and ten, But others say he's eighty. A long blue livery-coat has he, Full five and twenty years he lived A running huntsman merry; And, though he has but one eye left, His cheek is like a cherry. No man like him the horn could sound, His master's dead, and no one now Dwells in the hall of Ivor; Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead; He is the sole survivor. His hunting feats have him bereft Of his right eye, as you may see: And then what limbs those feats have left To poor old Simon Lee! He has no son, he has no child; His wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall, Upon the village common. And he is lean and he is sick, His little body's half awry, His ancles they are swoln and thick; His legs are thin and dry. When he was young he little knew Of husbandry, or tillage; And now he's forced to work, though weak, The weakest in the village. He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often, ere the race was done, He reeled and was stone-blind. And still there's something in the world At which his heart rejoices; For when the chiming hounds are out, |