"The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions."
[349] According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be
"not worth five shillings."
[350] Prelude, Book VI.
[351] This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss
Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's
conversation: "Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with
which he dwells on trifles; at other times he flows on in the utmost
grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." Robinson tells
us that he read "Resolution" and "Independence" to a lady who was
affected by it even to tears, and then said, "I have not heard
anything for years that so much delighted me; but, _after all, it is
not poetry_."
[352] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than
when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of
Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness
of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering
compression is masterly. Compare
"Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succor me!
O, think ye not my heart was sair
When my love dropt down and spake na mair?"
compare this with,--
"Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling,
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin:
Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.
* * * * *
"And Bruce (_as soon, as he had slain
The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
Against the Moorish Crescent."
These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a stanza
when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also
departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by
substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had
he written,--
"And Gordon never gave a hint,
But, having somewhat picked his flint,
Let fly the fatal bullet
That killed that lovely pullet,"
it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He
shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in
the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: "The poem of my friend has
indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no
distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a
human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural
impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something
supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually
acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection,
do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat
laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, and
drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would
think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems
lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
[353]
"A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
Full formed, like Venus rising from the sea."
_Prelude_, Book IV.
[354] Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and
Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, "These
quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed
me; it seemed almost as if he were _awed by the greatness of his own
power, the gifts with which he had been endowed_." (The italics are
mine.)
[355] His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate
influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is
evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who
have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a
hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream." (Letters,
Conversations, and Recollections of S.T.C., Vol. I. pp. 5-6.)
"Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound
of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:
"'The singing masons building roofs of gold.'
"This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats
thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with
the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.)
Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, "My ear is susceptible
to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help
thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.
[356] In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.
[357] In "Resolution" and "Independence".