71-74. The Youth

attended:

Cf. Wordsworth's feeling for nature in youth as represented in "Tintern Abbey," lines 65-85 (page 7).

103. "humorous stage": humorous means moody. The context shows that this alludes to the speech beginning “All the world's a stage" in Shakespeare's "As You Like It," II, vii, 139 ff.

118-119. Thou, over whom thy immortality etc.: Cf. the last six lines of the sonnet "It is a Beauteous Evening," page 32.

(42.) 127-128: And custom -- as life: Notice the connected and cumulative suggestions of weight, cold, and depth. Compare the speech beginning "That monster, custom" in "Hamlet," II, iv, 161 ff. — But whereas Shakespeare dwells also upon the creative value of custom for the individual life, the majority of writers from Wordsworth's time on, have emphasized only its deadening effects: e.g., Emerson's essay on "Self-Reliance," paragraphs 6-11.

134, 139, 141, 148. not indeed For Not for But for But for: These connectives indicate the structure of this involved sentence.

141-147. those obstinate questionings etc.: "I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of

an opposite character" (from Wordsworth's note.)

143. Fallings from us, vanishings: "I was sure of my own mind; everything fell away and vanished into thought" (from a comment by Wordsworth).The root of this condition, and of his belief in immortality, was "a sense of the indomitableness of the Spirit within me" (from Wordsworth's note).

151. yet: still, i.e., in manhood; cf. "yet" in line 189.

181. primal sympathy: This probably comprises both his inborn feeling for nature and his inborn "intimation of immortality." See the remark on "natural piety" in the introductory note on this poem, above.

"The course of the great war with the French naturally fixed one's attention upon the military character" (from Wordsworth's note). Compare the sonnet "I grieved for Buonaparté," written four years earlier and exhibiting the same twosided thought as the present poem. The poet's musings (1) upon public men, and (2) upon his own and similar lives, flow together here in a sketch of the spirit of the ideal statesman for this, rather than the narrower subject indicated by the title, is the real theme of the piece.

5. the plan boyish thought: a high ideal of human service cherished in boyhood. In this poem, as in the preceding, "The Child is father of the Man," and the progress of a life from boyhood to age is indicated. 15-16. a power highest dower: It is this power (what is it?) that draws together, throughout the remainder

For the development of Wordsworth's spirit and art, compare this sunset ode, written in the close of his great period, with the description of the sunset in “An Evening Walk" (page 1), written before he had found himself. (50.) 8. What is? can be: The scene reflects a higher beauty than can appear in external nature; cf. lines 34-40, 5354.

9-15. Time was when field etc.: Cf. Milton's "Paradise Lost," IV, 677-688. (51.) 43-46. You hazy ridges etc.: "The multiplication of mountain-ridges, described at the commencement of the third stanza of this ode, as a kind of Jacob's Ladder, leading to Heaven, is produced either by watery vapors, or sunny haze, in the present instance by the latter cause" (from Wordsworth's note).

61-80. such hues etc.: This stanza, as Wordsworth himself notes, is pervaded by allusions to the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" (page 40).

A LITTLE UNPRETENDING RILL

(52.) 10. Emma: the poet's sister, Dorothy.

AFTER-THOUGHT

Like others (e.g., Spenser in "The Faerie Queene,' Book Seventh; Shakespeare in "The Tempest," IV, i, 148-158), Wordsworth felt more solemnly, as he advanced in middle age, the transitoriness of earthly things and persons, "sad mortality's earth-sullying wing" (see "November 1, page 47). An undertone of this goes through "An Evening of Extraordinary Splendor" (page 50), and "Laodamia" (see especially lines 68-72, page 48). (52.) 1. thee: The River Duddon.

the autumn of 1831. The season is worked into the mood of the sonnet (see lines 3, 11). Also, see the note on "AfterThought" (column opposite).

"THERE!" SAID A STRIPLING

(54.) 4-8. Far and wide etc.: Cf. "Tintern Abbey," lines 4-8 (page 7). What other important images of Wordsworthian serenity do you recall?-Different was Robert Burns (1759-1796), poet of restless passion. "It is remarkable that, though Burns lived some time here, and during much the most productive period of his poetical life, he nowhere adverts to the splendid prospects stretching towards the sea and bounded by the peaks of Arran on one part, which in clear weather he must have had daily before his eyes" (from Wordsworth's note).

9. random bield: chance shelter. The quoted words are from Burns's poem "To a Mountain Daisy, on Turning one down with the Plough," which is alluded to throughout the remainder of this sonnet.

MOST SWEET IT IS

7-8. slipping in between etc.: This phrase qualifies both "scene" and "tone" in the preceding lines.

13. The Mind's internal heaven: See the last stanza of "I Wandered Lonely" (page 38), and the note on that poem.

NOT IN THE LUCID INTERVALS

1-2. lucid intervals to partystrife: periods of calm regarded only as a curse by a striving politician. — The idea of lines 1-7 is that worldlings absorbed in ambition, pleasure, or business cannot, in minutes of open-air leisure, feel the best values of nature.

(55.) 7-15. nor do words etc.: "Written with Lord Byron's character, as a poet, before me, and that of others, his contemporaries, who wrote under like influences."

12-13. if he dare passion's sake: if he presumes to believe that the

craving for vivid feeling is the ultimate. principle of life; cf. "Laodamia," lines 7475, 145-150 (page 48-50). (55.) 14-15. meekness

truly great:

Cf. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." The word "meekness" has not here its negative meaning of pliant submissiveness, as in popular usage. It means the hard attainment of inward humility and gentleness through self-control, which "the truly great" cherish as their leading principle (instead of the one mentioned in the preceding note).

16-31. But who is innocent etc.: Is Wordsworth's view of nature in relation to God and morality the same here, essentially, as in "Tintern Abbey," lines 93-111 (page 8), or different? Compare also "Presences of Nature in Boyhood," lines 401-414 (page 10); "Down the Simplon Pass," lines 624-640 (page 12); and "The Recluse," lines 836-860 (page 19).

25. that bounded field: the external Universe with all its beauties, as described in the preceding lines. — Compare the view of serenity and peace given in lines 24-31 with the view given in earlier poems; see the note on "Nature's Healing" (page 658, above).

PROTEST AGAINST THE BALLOT

For the general standpoint, see lines 10-14 of the preceding poem. The spirit of political conservatism grew very strong in England during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, owing to the excesses of the French Revolution; and was shared by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other of the elder writers. The spirit of liberalism -shared by Byron, Shelley, and other writers of the new generation - became clamorous in the second decade. A Radical party was formed in 1819; but no signal effects were achieved until 1830. In that year, revolutions occurred in France and elsewhere, and the Whigs came into power in England. The Reform Act of 1832 (alluded to in lines 1-5 of this sonnet) shifted the balance of political power in England from the landed gentry to the manufacturers and merchants. In 1838 (the year of the sonnet)

the People's Charter, drawn up by Radical and working-class leaders, demanded manhood suffrage and vote by ballot. (56.) 12. Pandorian gift: a punning allusion to the box of troubles opened by Pandora, the classical Eve.

WHO PONDERS NATIONAL EVENTS

Wordsworth is usually preoccupied with the beautiful and orderly powers of nature, as imaging the best in human nature (e.g., "Ode to Duty," lines 41-48, page 38). Here, pondering in old age the evils of national life, he thinks of nature's destructive forces (line 7). But he condemns the doctrine that similar forces operate as by natural necessity in human society. He intimates that man is most "divine" (compare lines 5 and 13) when his "Will," guided by "Conscience" and "Truth," operates "to control and check disordered powers." - See the context of this poem, in "Miscellaneous Sonnets of 1842," Numbers IV-VI, written in allusion to recent views of the French Revolution. The famous history of this event by Thomas Carlyle had appeared in 1837.

9-11. But woe - - - social havoc: See "The Poet and the French Revolution," lines 162-163 and context (page 13).

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

Son of a Devonshire clergyman, Coleridge in his childhood was addicted (so he tells us) to dreaming, to sloth, and to passionate sensibility. Already the mind of the future Transcendental philosopher and poet was "habituated to the Vast;" he never regarded his senses, he adds, “in any way the criteria of my belief." Leaving his country home before his tenth birthday, he entered the old London school known as Christ's Hospital; and here he formed a lasting friendship with his fellowstudent Charles Lamb, acquired "a rage for metaphysics," reading precociously in Voltaire and the Neo-Platonists, and dreamed, as he says in "Frost at Midnight" (page 76).

"Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower."

In October, 1791, while the National Assembly was in its first sessions in France, Coleridge began his college career. At Jesus College, Cambridge, he adopted the radical politics of the Revolution, continued his voracious but desultory reading, acquired debts, and suffered disappointed love. Unceremoniously leaving the University after two years, he enlisted in a regiment of dragoons; but, having “a violent antipathy to soldiers and horses," he presently returned to Cambridge, though in the end he left without taking a degree.

With Southey, a youthful radical at Oxford who ultimately became Poet Laureate, he planned an ideal community or "Pantisocracy" to be established on the banks of the Susquehanna in America a scheme that soon proved impracticable and resulted only in the marriage of Coleridge and Southey to the Fricker sisters, who were to have been their partners in the enterprise. For Coleridge the union proved unhappy, - more through his own deficiency, it would appear, than through that of Sarah Fricker, and during most of his subsequent life he was rarely with his wife and children. In the main, the story of his later years is one of domestic infelicity, poverty alleviated by gifts from warm friends, abortive enterprises, fragmentary accomplishments, mental depression, physical illness, and "slavery" (his own word) to opium.

Before the shadows of his life darkened, however, there was one burst of golden happiness, that idyllic year with the Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills of Somerset. He loved Wordsworth, and admired his powers with unbounded enthusiasm; and daily intercourse, daily rhapsodical confidences and speculation, in which the eloquent Coleridge doubtless did most of the talking, at length made possible "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (page 56), his chief contribution to Lyrical Ballads and one of the masterpieces of the "renascence of wonder." In their plan for Lyrical Ballads the two poets divided the realm of wonder into the natural and the supernatural. While Wordsworth was "to give the charm of

novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatu- > ral, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us," Coleridge, on the other hand, was to deal with “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (Biographia Literaria, ch. 14). In a word, Wordsworth was to render the natural magical, and Coleridge the magical natural.

This division of the province of romance really constitutes a definition of the divergent art of the two poets; and, a more organic collaboration having been given up, Wordsworth and Coleridge henceforth made their attack upon custom, routine, and the "meddling intellect," each in his own way. Within but a few months Coleridge composed most of his best work, including, in addition to the "Ancient Mariner," the first part of "Christabel" (page 64), "Frost at Midnight" (page 76), "Kubla Khan" (page 72), and "France: An Ode" (page 74). The last of these, written in February, 1798, and originally published as "The Recantation," marks the extinction of Coleridge's enthusiasm for revolutionary France and his perception

that

"The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain." For some time previous his enthusiasm had been waning; when "Citizen" Thelwall visited him at Nether Stowey, rousing the suspicions of orthodox neighbors, he had found himself out of sympathy with his friend's radical views and definitely moving toward that conservatism which, as in the case of Wordsworth, more and more determined his outlook upon life.

When at length the Somerset idyll terminated in the expedition to Germany, his years of poetic plenty were at an end. Possessing, from childhood onward, strong religious instincts, fond of the Neoplatonic mystics and of Boehme, Coleridge early became a Unitarian, even trying for a pas