Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds’ singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save where your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind.’
These lines from _France_ were written by Coleridge when he was a little
over twenty-five years old. In the combination of two gifts, music and
meaning, he is hardly surpassable at his best by any poet. Not an atom
of meaning is sacrificed to gain a melody: in fact the melody adds to the
meaning.
Here is another example showing how the poetic form with Coleridge is not
a hindrance to expression, but aids it.
Gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures
Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures
The things of Nature utter; birds or trees,
Or moan of ocean-gale in weedy caves,
Or where the stiff grass ’mid the heath-plant waves,
Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze.’
His similitudes are not mere external comparisons; the objects compared
become _modes_ of unity. ‘A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the
_alive_ [italics C.’s] sea, most interestingly combined with the number
of white seagulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had
taken life and wing, and had flown up.’
* * * * *
The intimations which are but whispered, the Presences which are but
half-disclosed, are those which we should intently obey. The coarsely
obvious has its own strength.
‘She went forth alone
Urged by the indwelling angel-guide, that oft,
With dim inexplicable sympathies
Disquieting the heart, shapes out Man’s course
To the predoomed adventure.’
_Destiny of Nations_.
* * * * *
Wordworth’s habit of spending so much time in the open air and with the
humble people around him gives to what he says the value of experience,
distinguishable totally from the ideas of the literary man, which may be
brilliant, but do not agree with the sun, moon and stars, and turn out to
be nothing when we ask is the thing really _so_.
Wordsworth’s verses have been in the sun and wind. It is a test of good
sane writing that we can read it out of doors.
* * * * *
If Wordsworth’s love of clouds and mountains ended there it would be no
better than the luxury of a refined taste. But it does not end there.
It affects the whole of his relationships with men and women, and is
therefore most practical.
* * * * *
In Wordsworth what we expect does not come, but in its place the
unexpected. In the twelfth book of the _Prelude_ he tells us:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master—outward sense
The obedient servant of her will.’
He then gives us one of these ‘passages,’ and what is it? A day when as
a child he saw
‘A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind.’