The perennial force and freshness of this short poem, that first appeared in the 1798 collection ‘Lyrical Ballads’, reminds us of how William Wordsworth may have become a bit of a bore in his later years but once blew like a great gale through the decorous drawing-rooms of eighteenth-century verse.

The identity of the poem’s subject is not known. It is generally grouped with the four ‘Lucy’ poems, but that doesn’t get us very far because there is no agreement as to who Lucy was, if indeed she was any more than a literary device. Yet the poem’s very anonymity helps to make its truth more universal: that we find it hard, even impossible, to contemplate the death of our loved ones until one day, perhaps suddenly, they are no longer there.

A slumber did my spirit seal

A slumber did my spirit seal
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

William Wordsworth

I wonder, incidentally, if A.E.Housman had this poem in mind when he used a very similar conceit in his own beautiful lyric, ‘The night is freezing fast’:

‘The night is freezing fast,
Tomorrow comes December
And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
And chiefly I remember
How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
His overcoat for ever
And wears the turning globe.’

Housman was certainly an admirer of Wordsworth, citing him in his famous 1933 Cambridge lecture ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ as one who spoke with the true voice of poetry, so it seems more than possible.

It is easy now to take Wordsworth for granted and to forget just how revolutionary he must have seemed, coming after an age of poetry dominated by Pope’s neat heroic couplets. Pope had famously said ‘The proper study of mankind is man’, and we can concede this up to a considerable point, but the concession is then diminished by the realisation that Pope means ‘man in society’ and that he has little interest in ‘man in the natural world’. Then along comes Wordsworth and all sorts of things start appearing in poetry: lakes, mountains, owls, hazel nuts, moons, stars, mysterious presences…

Here is the stolen boat episode from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’ (see also week 242). If the strange terror the poet describes seem a little over the top – relax, William, it’s just a big rock – then bearing in mind that Wordsworth was a child, alone at night and feeling some guilt over his small theft, it all seems at least as understandable as the young Seamus Heaney having the heebie-jeebies over a pond full of frogs. Sensitive lot, these poets.

The ‘her’ in the first line refers to Nature as a sort of moral tutor.

From ‘The Prelude’

One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

William Wordsworth

This week I attended the funeral service of an ex-work colleague, dead before her sixtieth birthday. I know that perceptions of age are relative – nine-year-old Daisy Ashford in ‘The Young Visitors’ writes of ‘an elderly gentleman of 42’ – but certainly from my own present perspective fifty-nine seems way too young to die. Not, of course, as young as Wordsworth’s daughter, but still, it was his great poem of bereavement that came to my mind during the service, so I dedicate this week’s choice to the memory of one I knew as a lively young woman, and to her husband, left like Wordsworth without his ‘heart’s best treasure’.

Surprised by joy

Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport – Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind –
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss! – That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was, as far as I recall, the first of my poetic influences: I read ‘The Prelude’ in my early teens and admired it greatly, the more so because it chimed so well with the kind of wandering, reflective, close to nature childhood that it was still just about possible to have back then, and which I had myself enjoyed, though in a rather less rugged environment than Wordsworth’s Lake District. Later I came to be not exactly disenchanted with Wordsworth, but to feel that he was no longer quite what I wanted or needed: what he offered, it seemed to me, was a leisurely ramble in the hills that offered you great views at some points but also involved a lot of slightly tedious plodding in between, and I was beginning to feel that a poem should be more like a fell run, taut and unrelenting all the way to the top. But here, for the sake of that early admiration, is my favourite passage from ‘The Prelude’, that I think shows the poet at his vivid, immediate best, and if I now wish that overall his gait were just a little less leisurely, I remain grateful for those visionary viewpoints that from time to time it takes us to.

From ‘The Prelude’

And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom,
I heeded not their summons: happy time
It was indeed for all of us – for me
It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six, – I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, – the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me – even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

William Wordsworth