SOURCE: Woof, Pamela. “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals and the Engendering of Poetry.” In Wordsworth in Context, edited by Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy, pp. 122-55. Canterbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1992.

[In the following essay, Woof studies the relationships between Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and William Wordsworth's poems.]

The story of how some of Wordsworth's poetry was engendered can be pieced together from Dorothy's Journal, and this will be the subject of the first part of this paper. The second part will be a discussion of some of the characteristics of prose poetry that Dorothy engendered in her own writing. Her accounts of daily life, by no means shaped for artistic effect, nevertheless sometimes attained that effect; her words often surprise us as poetry does with that sudden surge into truth.

I

The poem “Beggars” was written 13-14 March 1802; its origin lay in an encounter that took place on 27 May 1800, almost two years before. Dorothy recorded on that day:

I walked to Ambleside with letters—met the post before I reached Mr Partridges, one paper, only a letter for Coleridge—I expected a letter from Wm. It was a sweet morning, the ashes in the valleys nearly in full leaf but still to be distinguished, quite bare on the higher grounds. I was warm in returning, & becoming cold with sitting in the house—I had a bad head-ach—went to bed after dinner, & lay till after 5—not well after tea. I worked in the garden, but did not walk further. A delightful evening before the Sun set but afterwards it grew colder. Mended stockings & c.¹

There was no mention of the meeting with the beggar woman. During these first three weeks of the Journal, begun 14 May 1800, Dorothy was alone, Wordsworth and John having gone into Yorkshire to stay with the Hutchinsons. She recorded planting, weeding, watering, drinking tea with Miss Simpson, reading Shakespeare, writing letters, walking to Ambleside to look for letters, going to church, putting up valances; there are no extended descriptions of people met upon the roads. Wordsworth returned on 7 June, and on the 10th he and Dorothy walked to Ambleside. That night she completed her entry for 10 June, drew her normal concluding line after it, and then launched into her long description of the beggar woman and her two boys, met two weeks before:

On Tuesday, May 27th, a very tall woman, tall much beyond the measure of tall women, called at the door. …

Her long account is both recollected and revised: “I saw two boys one about 10 the other about 8”; a clarifying phrase is inserted: “I saw two boys before me, one about 10.” Again, “I served your Mother this morning (The Boys were so like her that I could not be mistaken)”; the word “her” is crossed out and the illogicality removed by an additional inserted clause. “(The Boys were so like the woman who had called at the door that I could not be mistaken.)” When the boys “flew like lightning” away, Dorothy continued, “They had however sauntered so long at Ambleside”; this is misremembered, and Dorothy corrected, “They had however sauntered so long in their road that they did not reach Ambleside before me.” After she records seeing them creep “with a Beggars complaining foot,” her story went on: “On my return I met the mother driving her asses”; this is revised to a precise, “On my return through Ambleside I met in the street the mother driving her asses.” Nothing so far in the Journal has been written with such sustained attention to detail as this account of an episode that had been left out of the original record of the day when it took place. The impulse to write it down must have come out of conversation: Dorothy, walking with Wordsworth on that same Ambleside road, surely told him of the adventure of two weeks before, and as a result of his interest, on returning, she wrote it down. Dorothy's famous account of the leech-gatherer must have a similar origin. It was written on the morning of 4 October 1800, and was about an incident of 26 September, but the account follows another of Wordsworth's walks to Ambleside: “I went with him part of the way—he talked much about the object of his Essay for the 2nd volume of LB.” Talking about that essay, the forthcoming Preface for Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its well-known emphasis on the advantages of writing about “low and rustic life” among the “beautiful and permanent forms of nature,” must have brought back to mind for both brother and sister the leech-gatherer whom they had met on 26 September. Dorothy's careful recollected description follows this talking. Another instance: the story of Alice Fell was a twice-told tale before it reached the Journal: Mr. Graham told it to Wordsworth, Wordsworth to Dorothy, Dorothy to her Journal, and shortly afterwards Wordsworth retold the story in verse. It is a reminder of how many of the stories in the Journal seem to have begun in conversations. Among other things, the Journal is a collection, a deliberate collection, of oral stories.

The story of the beggar family next turns up at about 5:30 on a Sunday afternoon, 14 March 1802. Wordsworth had gone to bed after dinner, and Dorothy, as so often when Wordsworth took a nap, wrote up her Journal. The achievements for Saturday, the day before, were first of all summarized:

It was as cold as ever it has been all winter very hard frost. I baked pies Bread, & Seed-cake for Mr Simpson—William finished Alice Fell, & then he wrote the Poem of the Beggar woman taken from a Woman whom I had seen in May—(now nearly 2 years ago) when John & he were at Gallow hill—I sate with him at Intervals all the morning, took down his stanzas & c—

Dorothy then moves into detail about a walk to Rydal:

After dinner we walked to Rydale, for letters, it was terribly cold we had 2 or 3 brisk hail showers. The hail stones looked clean & pretty upon the dry clean Road. Little Peggy Simpson was standing at the door catching the Hail-stones in her hand. She grows very like her Mother. When she is sixteen years old I daresay that, to her Grandmothers eye she will seem as like to what her Mother was as any rose in her garden is like the Rose that grew there years before.

The phrase “years before” is inserted above some words that have been crossed out; these appear to read “when the mother was a child before she is a woman.” Dorothy's interest clearly is in likeness: how a rose is like a rose of some distant previous year, and how a child is like its mother, and like that mother must have seemed to the grandmother. Dorothy then proceeds with detail about the composition of the poem “Beggars:”

After tea I read to William that account of the little Boys belonging to the tall woman & an unlucky thing it was for he could not escape from those very words, & so he could not write the poem, he left it unfinished & went tired to Bed. In our walk from Rydale he had got warmed with the subject & had half cast the Poem.

Sunday Morning [14th]. William had slept badly—he got up at 9 o clock, but before he rose he had finished the Beggar Boys—

Wordsworth had not been reading Dorothy's Journal before beginning the poem. That he had “half cast the Poem” during the walk from Rydal was surely to do with their seeing a child like its mother, and with the recollection of that conversation with Dorothy about the beggar woman's children seen almost two years before and unmistakably like their mother. Brother and sister must have talked about resemblance between generations. Dorothy's actual written words, when she looked up her old notebook and read them after tea to Wordsworth, inhibited him; he “could not escape” from them. Yet there must have been one detail there that did finally release him—the butterfly. Those boys, as like their mother as little Peggy Simpson was like hers, in Wordsworth's words,

Two Brothers seem'd they, eight and ten years old;
And like that Woman's face as gold is like to gold(2)

were at play, not catching clean and pretty hailstones like Peggy Simpson, but chasing a butterfly. The poem had begun as “the Poem of the Beggar woman”; it was finished next morning as “the Beggar Boys.” It was Spenser who probably contributed to the change of emphasis. The association in Dorothy's account of a butterfly with a mother and her children alike beautiful to see and yet in a “state of the greatest moral depravity,” as Wordsworth later termed it in 1808,³ perhaps directed Wordsworth to that very dramatic phrase, “a Weed of glorious feature,” borrowed from Spenser and used by Wordsworth to form the moral climax of his portrait of the mother. There is no censure in this phrase in Spenser's “Muiopotmos or The Fate of the Butterfly.”⁴ Here, Clarion, a happy butterfly, briefly enjoys the delights of a paradisal garden, and feeds on “flowres and weeds of glorious feature,” before he is caught and killed by a hideous spider foe. From this perhaps comes the suggestion in Wordsworth's poem that the children, besides “chasing a crimson butterfly” (Dorothy had not given it a color), are not unlike butterflies themselves in their beauty, their movements, and, in association with “Muiopotmos,” their possibly dismal future. In Dorothy's account of June 1800, after she had refused to give the boys anything more, “away they flew like lightning.” Wordsworth has no lightning; his boys are more like butterflies in flight,

                                                                      without more ado
Off to some other play they both together flew. …

An added verse in 1827 brings out more clearly his sense of their similarity to the beautiful and vulnerable butterflies, the very “fluttering game” they hunted,

Wings let them have, and they might flit. …

Wordsworth finished the poem “before he rose” the next morning, 14 March 1802, and the conversation at breakfast (not surprisingly) was about butterflies. That afternoon, at about half past five, with Wordsworth returned to bed, Dorothy recorded that breakfast conversation and the subsequent composition of the next poem, “To a Butterfly,” “Stay near me—do not take thy flight”:

The thought first came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we both always feel at the sight of a Butterfly.

Immediately, with his “Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & butter he wrote the Poem to a Butterfly!” The chasers now are not two beggar boys, but Wordsworth himself as a child and Dorothy who “used to chase them a little but that I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, & did not catch them—.” And the butterfly, like the cuckoo before it and the rainbow after it, has become a talisman for Wordsworth, a talisman into the past, a bringer of images to the heart, a historian of infancy.

A month later the butterfly is back again, now in its role of victim; another poem is written, and the Journal establishes that its genesis occurred some months before. On 18 April 1802 Wordsworth and Dorothy “sate in the orchard—William wrote the poem on the Robin & the Butterfly.” Dorothy, recording this, recalls her own observation of the day before, the 17th, and squeezes an insertion into that previous day's entry, “I saw a Robin chacing a scarlet Butterfly this morning.” In the poem Wordsworth expresses his sorrowful wonder that a robin (and an English, not an American robin, a domestic bird of garden crofts and crumbs in winter) should pursue a beautiful butterfly:

Could Father Adam open his eyes
And see this sight beneath the skies,
He'd wish to close them again.

The bird's aggression is familiar; man shares it, and Wordsworth underlines this by noting the universal habit of calling the robin by our own common names: in English, “Robin,” but

          the Charles of Swedish Boors
In Germany their little Hans
The Frederick who they love in France
Their Thomas in Finland. …

(PTV, 75)

Yet the robin, again like us, and like the butterfly, is a victim too. All are victims. The creature kinship of bird to butterfly is made clear, almost ridiculously, “As if he were bone of thy bone” (there are no bones in butterflies). “We,” Dorothy records at night, “left out some lines.” This particular line ultimately was altered to “A brother he seems of thine own.” Despite such improvement, the poem attracted parody when it was published in 1807. Richard Mant, author of “The Simpliciad” (1808), mocked

Poets, [who] …
With brother lark or brother robin fly
And flutter with half-brother butterfly …

(ll. 204-6)

And Wordsworth's poem attracted incomprehension. De Quincey, thirty years later, recalled meeting a Mrs. Grant of Laggan in London in 1808 and that the lady had demanded apropos the lines—

Could Father Adam open his eyes
And see this sight beneath the skies,
He'd wish to close them again.

—“Now what possible relation can Father Adam have to this case of the bird and the butterfly?” De Quincey at the time parried Mrs. Grant's question, but later the light flashed upon him that Wordsworth's “secret reference must be to that passage in the ‘Paradise Lost’ where Adam is represented—on the very next morning after his fatal transgression, and whilst yet in suspense as to the shape in which the dread consequences would begin to reveal themselves, and how soon begin—as lifting up his eyes, and seeing the first sad proof that all flesh was tainted, and that corruption had already travelled, by mysterious sympathy, through universal nature.”⁵ Adam is troubled, and we realize that the significance of Wordsworth's redbreast chasing a butterfly comes from Milton's words,

The bird of Jove, stooped from his airy tower,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove:
Down from a hill the beast that reigns in woods,
First hunter then, pursued a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind;
Direct to the eastern gate was bent their flight.
Adam observed, and with his eye the chase
Pursuing, not unmoved to Eve thus spake.

(11.185-92)⁶

De Quincey debated long with himself, but finally decided that Wordsworth was entitled “to presume in his readers such a knowledge of Milton.” Nevertheless, he mentioned the difficulty to Wordsworth, who then himself added a footnote directing readers to Paradise Lost, book 11. And Paradise Lost 11 had been Wordsworth's and Dorothy's last sustained reading before their spring 1802 immersion in the poetry of Ben Jonson. “After tea,” wrote Dorothy on 2 February 1802, “I read aloud the 11th Book of Paradise Lost we were much impressed & also melted into tears. The papers came in soon after I had laid aside the Book—a good thing for my William.” These tears are now explained: like Adam, Wordsworth was “not unmoved” at the sight of aggression in the natural world, and “The Robin and the Butterfly” of April is thus linked to the tears of February when this poem in a sense began.

Within a day of this April poem is written the third butterfly poem, “I've watched you now a full half-hour,” where the butterfly is back in its role of unlocking the past, but now with a difference; the theme is again paradise lost:

We'll talk of sunshine and of song
And summer days, when we were young.

Youth and paradise have gone:

Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

And the poet perhaps protests too much that the garden is a “sanctuary,” that the butterfly need “fear no wrong.” Despite his assertion of protection that

This plot of Orchard-ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister's flowers, …

(PTV, 216)

neither he nor any fallen human being can control predatory robins. It is in this kind of way that Dorothy's Journal can lead us to an understanding of how, say, “Beggars” and the Butterfly poems were engendered. We cannot put together quite so full a picture of the background of “To the Cuckoo” or “My heart leaps up,” but still, through the Journal, there are hints toward origins. First, “To the Cuckoo.” Wordsworth entered upon his long literary relationship with the cuckoo when, as we know from the Journal, he was preparing a version of the medieval “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale” in the winter of 1801-2. The bird of this poem was the antecedent of Shakespeare's

Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

It was a bird of moral meaning rather than one of wings and voice, and Wordsworth found himself having to speak of its “uncouth singing,” to assert “full little joy have I now of thy cry,” to describe it as the “sorry Cuckoo,” the “bird unholy,” the “churlish bird,” the “false bird.”⁷ Yet he would, even as he was writing this poem, be already aware of a very different literary cuckoo, the cuckoo of John Logan's “Ode to the Cuckoo.” In May 1801 his brother John, about to set off on a voyage with a brand new set of Anderson's British Poets, had written to Dorothy asking her to get William's advice for him with regard to what best to read in Anderson's Poets, “and I would be more particularly pleased at his pointing out any good poems in poets such as Logan for instance.”⁸ Wordsworth no doubt pointed out the very first Logan poem in Anderson, “Ode to the Cuckoo” (and he could well have recommended the second one, “The Braes of Yarrow,” undoubtedly one of the “various Poems” associated with that river that Wordsworth referred to in his headnote for his own “Yarrow Unvisited” of 1803). Anderson's own view of John Logan (1748-88) was admiring and compassionate, for Logan had a “pensive melancholy” such as “men of genius and feeling” felt, his spirits were “always much elated, or much depressed,” and since he “eagerly snatched that temporary relief which the bottle supplied”⁹ he was thought to have hastened his death. Dorothy's description of him as “poor Logan” (Journal, 4 June 1802) would surely carry both her own and Wordsworth's feeling and fear for poets who were subject to depression as well as joy, poets who met early death, the poets indeed of that great poem of spring 1802, “Resolution and Independence”: Logan, one of the shadowy company; Burns and Chatterton mentioned; Coleridge, and Wordsworth himself perhaps, implied and in similar jeopardy.

Dorothy, some months after presumably replying to John's request for good Logan poems, came yet again in contact with Logan and his cuckoo poem. And it was on a day, 8 December 1801, on which “Wm worked at the Cuckow & the Nightingale till he was tired.” On that day Dorothy “read Bruce's Lochleven & Life.” As she read Anderson's “Life of Bruce” Dorothy would have come across Anderson's comment that he had not included among Bruce's poems the “Ode to the Cuckoo” because in his view this was the work of Logan. Confusingly, Logan had himself included it in his edition of Bruce's poems, 1770, and had then reprinted it with some alterations in his own volume of Poems, 1781. Feeling apparently ran high among the friends and family of both deceased poets; Anderson discusses the vexed question of authorship in his “Life of Logan,” and in his “Life of Bruce” simply points to the poem as Logan's. Indubitably, this Cuckoo, Logan's or Bruce's, was known to Wordsworth.¹⁰ Even as he was composing his version of the medieval dream poem, consolidating the stereotype of the cuckoo, he must have been aware of that contrasting freshness, that move toward a different account of the bird that is in Logan's poem.¹¹ Although Logan's first lines, “Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove / Thou messenger of Spring,” have still a literary antecedent—they are borrowed from Spenser's sonnet “The merry Cuckow, messenger of Spring”—the poem reaches for direct experience. Logan's cuckoo, like Wordsworth's, is more than anything else a voice (in Wordsworth “a wandering Voice,” “a voice, a mystery”). Logan hails the “messenger of Spring,”

What time the daisy decks the green
Thy certain voice we hear.

His

          schoolboy wandering through the wood
To pull the primrose gay,
Starts, the new voice of Spring to hear …

and anticipates Wordsworth's

The same whom in my schoolboy days
I listened to. …

Although Logan's bird cannot make the poet

          listen, till I do beget
That golden time again …

it lives in an eternal spring:

Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year!

So Wordsworth, taking a hint from Logan, conceived of the cuckoo as a voice that could lead into an eternal spring, a golden time, that could tell of visionary hours. But he also felt compelled to present the bird as real. Neither the medieval poet nor Logan had tried to define the sound of the cuckoo. Wordsworth tried variously for many years, indeed until 1845 when he achieved the final precision of

While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear
From hill to hill it seems to pass
At once far off, and near.(12)

It was not only on 14 May 1802, we must presume, that Wordsworth “teased himself with seeking an epithet for the Cuckow.” On 23 March 1802, when Dorothy first records that Wordsworth “worked at the Cuckow poem,” there could be no actual cuckoos in Grasmere. Behind Wordsworth's poem was both his memory of the bird and two strands of literary tradition: that of “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale” and that of John Logan. The real cuckoo was heard in Grasmere on 29 April; Dorothy recorded, “Mr Simpson heard the Cuckow today”; she herself heard her first cuckoo of that spring on 1 May. On 3 June, with the poem written though not yet “teased” into perfection, Dorothy recorded their reading of the “writings of poor Logan” and also that on that day the “cuckow sang.” Did the real bird remind them of a literary one?

The literary context for My heart leaps up is less intricate than it is for “To the Cuckoo,” at least as far as the Journal reveals it. On one of those days when Wordsworth was “working at the Cuckow” a rainbow, like the cuckoo a natural, literary, and not immediately present object, became suddenly another way into the exploration of personal time and change. “The Rainbow” was written with no rainbow visible, at night, on 26 March 1802, “while I was getting into bed,” wrote Dorothy. In the cuckoo poem with which the day had begun Wordsworth radiates a confidence that he can, by listening to that voice again, transform the world to its earlier gold, but by that evening he was writing perhaps a little less surely of the power of just such another natural phenomenon, now the rainbow, to carry the harmonies of the past into the present, and beyond, into the future. There is a prayer in his rainbow poem:

So be it when I shall grow old
          Or let me die!

(PTV, 206)

And the following day there is something quite blank about the bald statement in the “Intimations Ode,” “The rainbow comes and goes.” It was a few weeks before this that Wordsworth had listened to Dorothy reading a poem in which past and present are discussed in the context of a rainbow. This discussion is banal; it has no complex of feeling about past and present as they change within the mind. The poem was by Thomas Campbell and we see once again how Wordsworth could take literary convention and transform it. On 1 February 1802 a long awaited box came from London and in it was Campbell's “Pleasures of Hope.” That same day Dorothy read it to Wordsworth. Published by the twenty-year-old Scottish poet in 1799, by 1806 “The Pleasures of Hope” was to reach its ninth edition. Wordsworth in 1802, with the far less popular Lyrical Ballads behind him, had been wanting to look at it for a year. Coleridge had written to Godwin in March 1801 for the return of his copy of Campbell “which Wordsworth wishes to see.” The poem begins with a rainbow:

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?—
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Thus, with delight, we linger to survey
The promised joys of life's unmeasured way;
Thus, from afar, each dim-discovered scene
More pleasing seems than all the past hath been. …(13)

Lulled by easy lilt and commonplace morality, we can almost achieve a contemporary reaction to Wordsworth's lines of 26 March:

My heart leaps up when I behold
          A Rainbow in the sky:

(PTV, 206)

These seem suddenly shocking, almost naked, with not an adjective or a hiding behind a plural pronoun “we” to soften the straight personal response. The Journal records only this one reading of Campbell. Crabb Robinson in 1812 reported that Wordsworth thought Blake “as having the elements of poetry a thousand times more than either Byron or Scott; but Scott he thinks superior to Campbell.” Indeed Wordsworth spoke, reported Crabb Robinson, “with great contempt of Campbell as a poet.”¹⁴ And Dorothy in 1811 referred to “the huddling nonsense of the ‘Pleasures of Hope.’”¹⁵ Contemptible or not, Campbell's rainbow and his easy optimism about time perhaps helped Wordsworth toward his own sharp poem with its complex awareness of time's changes.

My last example of how Dorothy's Journal helps us to understand the engendering of Wordsworth's poetry concerns “The Leech-gatherer.” This poem, later entitled “Resolution and Independence,” has behind it a complex of literary and personal presences; only one will be discussed here. On 5 May 1802 Dorothy recorded “I read The Lover's Complaint to Wm in bed & left him composed.” Wordsworth had gone to bed “very nervous” through working on “The Leech-gatherer.” Whose choice was it to read Shakespeare's “Lover's Complaint” aloud? It was certainly a happy choice, for it “left him composed”; and two days later when Dorothy next mentioned composition, she wrote that Wordsworth, “feeling himself strong, he fell to work at the Leech gatherer—he wrote hard at it till dinner time, then he gave over tired to death—he had finished the poem.” (He had not finished it of course and Dorothy, speaking in her own extraordinarily positive way, was “oppressed sick at heart for he wearied himself to death” with it in only two days' time.) But the power to finish even a version of “The Leech-gatherer” had perhaps a connection with “A Lover's Complaint” that “left him composed.” This is a narrative in the same rhyme royal as Wordsworth's poem, though Wordsworth retains the two extra syllables in each stanza's final line that Chatterton, “the marvellous Boy” of “The Leech-gatherer,” had himself added to the rhyme royal stanza in his “Excelente Balade of Charite.” In Shakespeare's “Lover's Complaint” the poet comes upon a seduced and abandoned maid “Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain” by the margin of a river, and he hears a “reverend man,” “privileged by age,” desire

                                                                                                                                  to know
In brief the grounds and motives of her woe.

A second time the old man desires

Her grievance with his hearing to divide;
If that from him there may be aught apply'd
Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage,
'Tis promis'd in the charity of age.

(BP, 2:671-74)

The first stanzas (“several stanzas”) of “The Leech-gatherer” had been written on 3 and 4 May, but in the shaping of the latter half of the poem, the encounter with the old man, Wordsworth perhaps received some confirmation from listening to Dorothy's reading on 5 May of Shakespeare's poem. The weeping maid in Shakespeare has a conventional trouble quite different from “the fears and fancies” that had come “thick” upon the poet in “The Leech-gatherer,” fears that were to come a second time as Wordsworth revised the poem after 14 June:

My former thoughts return'd, the fear that kills,
The hope that is unwilling to be fed,
Cold, pain, and labour, & all fleshly ills,
And mighty Poets in their misery dead;

In Wordsworth's poem it is the poet who takes the “freedom,” later “the stranger's privilege,” of “drawing” to the side of the old man: “And now such freedom as I could I took / And, drawing to his side, to him did say.” The old man, the “reverend man” in Shakespeare, “privileged by age,” was the one who “fastly drew” to the afflicted girl. It is the poet in the June-July “Leech-gatherer” who twice questions the old man, while in “A Complaint” it is the old man who asks twice and who listens to youth's story. The roles of speaking and listening are reversed, but then, Wordsworth had been metaphorically listening to old men as ministering angels since “Old Man Travelling” of 1797. “A Lover's Complaint” left Wordsworth “composed”: in its meter and in the broad sweep of its situation it must have been of interest to a poet struggling to write “The Leech-gatherer.” In both poems troubled youth meets beside water (there was no water, no pond in Dorothy's Journal account) an old man who simply has survived and who can perhaps impart “human strength.”

When Sara Hutchinson (and Mary) reacted with some reservations to the second half of the poem, apparently finding the old man's speech “tedious” (a great part of this version has been torn away in the only copy of it that exists),¹⁶ Wordsworth wrote to Sara defensively (14 June 1802). Nevertheless, he took note of the criticism and by 4 July—“Wm finished the Leechgatherer today”—much of the old man's direct account of his misfortunes has disappeared. Perhaps some of the “tedious” detail for this, “the godly books,” for example, had come from Dorothy's Journal account of 3 October 1800 (though Wordsworth in his first version had much detail that Dorothy does not have: he too had met the impressive leech gatherer that September day in 1800). In place of the old man's particular narrative detail Wordsworth now gave further emphasis to that “feeling of spirituality or supernaturalness” that was already connected with the old man's presence (see letter of 14 June 1802), the “peculiar grace / A leading from above, a something given.” The landscape shifts on revision into that of an ancient, almost timeless world: through the new sea-beast simile, that brings to mind distant geological time; through the stillness—the unmoving, enchanted cloud and the still old man; through the new language that seems to be from an earlier poetry—the word “espied,” the line “And still as I drew near with gentle pace,” the words “heareth,” “moveth,” “bespake,” the phrase “moorish flood.” “Moorish” is not a word that Wordsworth uses elsewhere; it recalls Spenser's “moorish fennes” in “Ruines of Time” (l. 140; BP, 2:566). The rhythms of “The Leech-gatherer” bring Spenser and Shakespeare to mind; and the poem already carried an echo of Wordsworth's own version of the medieval dream poem, “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” Jared Curtis's comment on the lines from “The Leech-gatherer”

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness

usefully draws attention to Wordsworth's early version of stanza 35 of “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale”:

For thereof comes discomfort & heart-sadness
Sickness and care & sorrows many and great
Untrust & jealousy, despite, debate
Depraving, shame, anger importunate
Pride envy mischief poverty & madness.

(PTV, 409)

Shakespeare's “Lover's Complaint” is itself almost a dream poem; its poet-narrator does not dream asleep as he hears the maid's story and hears the old man beg her to tell it, but he is similarly distanced: he is in “a sist'ring vale” and the story comes to him along an echo, as “down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale.” And Dorothy read “A Lover's Complaint” from Anderson, and near it in the same volume is Spenser's “Muiopotmos,” a poem from which Wordsworth had already borrowed, and next to that is Spenser's “Ruines of Time,” a poem again in the same rhyme royal and in the same mode as the “Complaint” and “The Leech-gatherer.” In the “Ruines” a narrator “chanced” to be beside a river, audience to a woman's lamentation on the other side. Her disappearance after the lament leaves the poet “long time in sencelesse sad affright.” He broods on her words—

My thought returned greeved home againe,
Renewing her complaint with passion strong

—and in a kind of trance he is offered images that chart sudden changes from states of bliss to states of sorrow, and then, he records,

Much was I troubled in my heavie spright,
At sight of these sad spectacles forepast,
That all my senses were bereaved quight,
And I in minde remained sore agast
I heard a voice, which loudly to me called,
That with the suddein shrill I was appalled.

The voice advises “a heart to God inclin'de” and the poem ends with visions of a heavenly nature. The affinities between the new “Resolution and Independence” and this poetry of an earlier time are pervasive rather than precise, but Wordsworth, after Dorothy's reading on 5 May, had “A Lover's Complaint” (surely reminding him of Spenser) fresh in mind. The poem left him immediately “composed,” and it is no surprise that when he shortly came to revise “The Leech-gatherer,” his poem moved in action, language, and rhythm toward Shakespeare (including Hamlet), Spenser, and the earlier dream poetry. The poet in “The Leech-gatherer” passes awake into a trancelike state:

The Old Man still stood talking by my side,
But soon his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide,
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent. …

A dream landscape fills the poet's imagination:

In my mind's eye I seem'd to see him pace
About the weary Moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently. …

In this discussion of “Beggars,” the Butterfly poems, “To the Cuckoo,” “My heart leaps up,” and “Resolution and Independence” I have tried to show how Dorothy's Journal can sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, point to the engendering of poetry.

II

Dorothy Wordsworth had an ease with her pen. There is an immediacy in her prose, whether it be in the single line or in the sustained anecdote. We come upon a sudden rising to perceptions and expressions that were clear and true for her and are a discovery of importance for us too. Again and again we see our world as well as hers with indisputable freshness. Such writing is not confined to the Grasmere Journals, and I shall try to show that the late mainly unpublished Journals of Dorothy's more stricken years are of a kind with the famous early writing. A kind of poetry is engendered.

This first example from a late Journal (12 February 1831) requires a little explanation for its context to be understood.

Snow drops in warm places hanging their bead like heads

So, on a February day in 1831, the snowdrops emerge from a “foggy morning” into an afternoon of “gleams of sunshine.” The day had been characteristic of Dorothy Wordsworth's days in these years after 1829 when bouts of illness narrowed activity to the valley, the garden, the room at Rydal Mount. It had been a day, according to the Journal, of news and visits: Sara Hutchinson had gone into Ambleside, Dorothy had been to Mrs. Luff's—a short walk down the hill and across the Rothay by Pelter Bridge; she had been visiting Mrs. Luff for thirty years, but now Captain Luff was long dead in Mauritius, and Mrs. Luff no longer had the house under “the storm-stiffened black Yew trees” that Dorothy had seen through “flying mists,” by the side of Ullswater in 1805. The Luffs' large white dog that had lain in moonshine under the old Yew Tree—“dark Tree with its dark shadow … elegant Creature as fair as a Spirit”—was now indeed no more than the “beautiful and romantic image” that Dorothy had called it in 1805. The only thing noted after this 1831 visit to Mrs. Luff is “no damage from flood”; flood was a fear at Mrs. Luff's present house, Fox Ghyll, the cottage at river level where De Quincey had from 1820-25 housed his children, while his books were in separate safety at Dove Cottage. “No damage from flood—& in our garden very small—Met by H. Cookson—comes home with me—.” H. Cookson was probably Hannah, daughter of Thomas Cookson of Kendal, a wool merchant who had stood banker to Wordsworth for £60 in 1804;¹⁷ Thomas had married an old schoolfriend of Sara Hutchinson, Elizabeth Mitford, and Sara was staying with the Cooksons in February 1805 when news reached Kendal of John Wordsworth's drowning. She immediately left to bring the sad tidings to Grasmere, and from that time the Cooksons of Kendal were sympathetic friends to the Wordsworths. They had latterly lost money, and two of the daughters, to help with “the burthen of a large family,” had come to “a very pretty Cottage at Ambleside” and established a day school “for the Gentry's children.”¹⁸ They have “raised themselves,” wrote Sara Hutchinson, “in the estimation of everyone.” Able now to walk frequently to Rydal Mount for tea, Hannah Cookson became a close friend: later in 1847 she was to give help to the whole family as Wordsworth's daughter Dora lay dying.¹⁹ “H. Cookson—comes home with me—S. arrives to Tea—& James after with news of good old Mrs Stricklands death—no Friends near her but Mr Gawthorpe, his housekeeper, & Nancy—Strange message to James—.” James Dixon, the Wordsworths' gardener, had brought the deathbed news.

Old Mrs. Strickland was ninety, or near it; she had been Hannah Gawthrop before marriage (so there was certainly one relative, Mr. Gawthorpe, attending her). Already an elderly widow when Dorothy first knew her as a friend of the Kendal Cooksons, she lived in Stricklandgate in Kendal and provided Dorothy with a fine viewing position during the electoral contest of 1818 between Lord Lowther and Brougham. Henry Brougham campaigned for Kendal on 23 March 1818, and Dorothy, a true Tory, stationed at Mrs. Strickland's windows, a bitter snow shower outside, listened and looked, and then, with a little help from Mrs. Strickland, quoted from and described Brougham's speech:

“They [the Lowthers] have great Riches, but how did they get their riches!”—Oh! he looked ready to lead a gang of Robespierrists set to pull down Lowther Castle and tear up the very trees that adorn it. He then—in illustration of what points I have really forgotten, bungled out a quotation from our “immortal Poet”—not, as he said “that Poet” (pointing towards the Ambleside road) you are not to suppose I mean him [Wordsworth] … No—the language intended to be uttered no doubt was Shakespeare's, but his memory here seemed to fail him; and as Mrs. Strickland said, “he put in some words of his own.”

(MY, 2:444)

After the report of Mrs. Strickland's death, Dorothy's entry for 12 February 1831 concluded, “Gleams of sunshine in afternoon & very pleasant—Snow drops in warm places hanging their bead like heads.”

This late Journal entry is a list of staccato points: fog—visit—Mrs. Luff's—flood—Tea—H. Cookson—Mrs. Strickland's death: some eighty words, and only two of them verbs. This has always been a possible style for the Journal:

Sunday Morning 14th. [September 1800] Made bread—a sore thumb from a cut—a lovely day—read Boswell in the house in the morning & after dinner under the bright yellow leaves of the orchard—the pear trees a bright yellow, the apple trees green still, a sweet lovely afternoon.

In 1831 the privacy is more opaque—lists of names, an unremitting allusiveness. Yet, amid all these words that now need annotation to bring them to life, there are—less frequently than before—but there still are those perceptions that open out, out of Dorothy's own time into ours or any other: “Snow drops in warm places hanging their bead like heads.” There they are; nothing is made of them; they are not even in a full sentence; no person is said to have seen them; yet, amid the visits and the tea, the damage and the death, “Snow drops in warm places” exist, and they are part of our experience too. “Hanging their bead like heads” is quite simply an accurate description of that brief stage before the flower opens, when the closed petals seem to form an opaque weight too heavy for the thread of stalk.

Thirty years before, such phrases that give us pause, and give us eyes to see our world as well as Dorothy's, were scattered over almost every entry. They approach the emblematic, yet without pretension or a reaching toward it; they lift events almost to vision:

Wednesday 9 June 1802: Wm slept ill. A soaking all-day Rain. We should have gone to Mr Simpson's to tea but we walked up after tea. Lloyds called. The hawthorns on the mountain sides like orchards in blossom. Brought Rhubarb down. It rained hard. Ambleside Fair. I wrote to Chris^r α MH.

Out of the rain and muddle of the day, we come suddenly clear of the house and into space and color, hawthorns on the mountainsides like orchards in blossom. There is space enough on mountainsides for not one orchard but several. Yet of course, orchards, with the exception of such small snug garden orchards as the Wordsworths' own close behind their house on a “little domestic slip of mountain” (EY, 274), are not commonly to be found on Lake District mountainsides. The flowering of mountains is a mingling of the sublime with the beautiful. Again, for orchards in blossom, as for snowdrops and their beadlike heads, there is short time allowed us to see them, and one of Dorothy Wordsworth's ways of catching at our feelings is her instinct to grasp at what is passing. Hawthorns in flower last as short a time as orchards in blossom. There is nothing new here, no extraordinary leap of imagination; there is just a sudden movement upwards, a fine sense, even a double sense—since orchards double hawthorns—of a very brief beauty. The permanent mountains, with their transient blossoming and no verb even to anchor them in syntax, provide imaginative release, while their context only adds to their power—the day's tasks and the unrelenting rain.

Dorothy notices such natural oppositions, but with the instinct of the true writer she rarely draws attention to the drama or to its tenuous resolution. “The near hills,” wrote Dorothy of that 1805 Ullswater landscape, “were in black shade, those on the opposite side were almost as bright as snow. Mrs. Luff's large white Dog lay in the moonshine upon the round knoll under the old Yew Tree—a beautiful and romantic image—the dark Tree with its dark shadow, and the elegant Creature as fair as a Spirit.”²⁰ This is a picture held against time: moonlight is as unfixed as bright snow that will melt, the dog, almost insubstantial in moonshine, will move, and the telling enchantment of the living creature momentarily fixed into permanence with the hills and tree, will be broken.

The Ullswater Excursion was, like the Scottish Journal, read by family and friends. Wordsworth revised and included it in Select Views (1810—the basic text of the later Guide to the Lakes). Thus, the writing is more expansive than in many comparable passages of the Grasmere Journals. Here, for example, is the Grasmere entry for the day immediately following the recording of the hawthorn blossom:

I wrote to Mrs Clarkson & Luff—went with Ellen to Rydale. Coleridge came in with a sack-full of Books & c & a Branch of mountain ash he had been attacked by a Cow—he came over by Grisdale—a furious wind. Mr Simpson drank tea. William very poorly—we went to bed latish. I slept in sitting room.

(10 June 1802)

Again, in the middle of struggling activities is an emblematic yoking—Coleridge, a sack full of books, and a branch of mountain ash. This says everything: it gives us Coleridge. Four days later Dorothy wrote to Mary and Sara Hutchinson and described again Coleridge's arrival:

in the evening Coleridge came over Grisdale Hawes with a wallet of books—he had had a furious wind to struggle with, and had been attacked by a vicious cow, luckily without horns, so he was no worse—he had been ill the day before—but he looked and was well—strong he must have been for he brought a load over those Fells that I would not have carried to Ambleside for five shillings. Mr. Simpson was with us when he came in—it was about 7 o'clock, William had been tired with talking to Mr. S., who had drunk tea with us, and had slept miserably, so he looked ill, and was out of spirits, and C. was shocked by his appearance—.

(EY, 362)

Everything in this expanded letter version is explained, is set in context: Coleridge was no worse because the cow had no horns; Wordsworth was so tired through talking to Mr. Simpson. There are not these links in the Journal: Mr. S. drank tea. William very poorly. The statements stand side by side, unconnected. And although it is good to know that Dorothy would not have carried that load of books to Ambleside for five shillings, it is more exciting to connect Coleridge and his “sack-full of Books” (a sackful, more absurd, more unwieldy, than a wallet) with the wind and a branch of mountain ash, sign of hope and of delight in the natural world. This branch is quite omitted from the letter, but it is the combination of opposites—books and the branch—that declares the idiosyncratic man. Coleridge is in part Matthew with his bough of wilding, in part Pericles even, struggling with the elements, his rusty armor a sackful of books, and in his hand, as in Pericles', the branch green at the top.

One final example of Dorothy's Journal habit of letting things be without putting them into relation: “I working & reading Amelia. The Michaelmas daisy droops” (7 November 1800). The woman reading (not, “I read Amelia”) and the autumnal flower create separate pictures of present being; each is, without touching; they are equals, and as we jump the space between, we jump them into life. This entry is in two parts: Dorothy clearly wrote the Journal during the time given to “Amelia,” and the Michaelmas daisy is followed by what is now a less exciting succession of pansies, ash trees and brown copses, all in the present tense but without the unexpected neighboring of “I … reading Amelia. The Michaelmas daisy droops.” The concluding line is then drawn below the entry and at some later point, perhaps in two days, Dorothy squeezed between the end of the entry and the final line a recollection: “The poor woman & child from Whitehaven drank tea—nothing warm that day.” She then forgot that on Friday she had been reading “Amelia” and she began again: “Friday 7th. A very rainy morning—it cleared up in the afternoon. We expected the Lloyds but they did not come. William still unwell. A rainy night.” This is summary writing for that same day: no reading of “Amelia” now, and the Michaelmas daisy is not there.

It is a reminder that the Journal is not of a piece. It is not all the vivid catching of instant moments; it is also, among much else, an incomplete and often humdrum record:

W & S[toddart] did not rise till I o clock. W very sick & very ill. S & I drank tea at Lloyds & came home immediately after, a very fine moonlight night—The moonshine like herrings in the water.

(31 October 1800)

By this last phrase, of course, we are arrested; with no perceiver and no verb, the moonshine is outside time, playing continuously upon the water, like herrings in the water. Previous readers of the manuscript have interpreted the one word “moonshine,” since it drops into the centerfold of the notebook, as two words, “moon shone”; I cannot see this, and I feel that the verbless phrase is entirely characteristic of Dorothy.

Wordsworth's tribute is just: “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.” Always, Dorothy watches, and she listens, to silence, to birds, and to water and wind: “waterfowl calling out by the lake side” as Dorothy and Wordsworth walk back from Ambleside at midnight (17 December 1801), the thrush that has shouted all day long in the orchard (21 February 1802), and beneath this same “dear voice” the “chearful undersong” of robins (23 February 1802), the owl whose halloo was like a human shout (13 June 1802), the raven's “hoarse voice” above the lake and the mountains “as if from their center” answering, musical, bell-like (26 July 1800), the swallows that “twitter & make bustle.” It is indeed for these birds that Dorothy most strongly expresses anxiety at the prospect of Wordsworth's marriage. Three weeks before she and Wordsworth left Grasmere on the first stage of the journey toward Wordsworth's marriage with Mary she wrote in her Journal:

I wrote to Mary after dinner while Wm sate in the orchard … I read my letter to William, speaking to Mary about having a cat. I spoke of the little Birds keeping us company. …

(16 June 1802)

And there follows a long passage, first about a little bird flying onto Wordsworth's leg as he lay under an apple tree, and second about swallows “as if wishing to build.” The passage is laced with small revisions, all tending to emphasize the birds' vulnerability; words are crossed out and written over: should it be “having” a cat or “keeping” a cat; should “keeping” be used only to describe the birds' “keeping us company”; should the next bird to be mentioned be a “young” bird or a “little” bird; the “little creature” becomes then “a little young creature”; the “little” bird becomes simply a bird, not “strong” enough, then not “stout” enough, finally again not “strong” enough; the bird “unacquainted with man & na[ture]” becomes the bird “unacquainted with man & unaccustomed to struggle against storms and winds.” The swallows originally “hang against the panes of glass”; in revision they “twitter & make a bustle & a little chearful song hanging against the panes of glass.” The letter Dorothy wrote and read to Wordsworth is lost, but from these several Journal revisions we can tell that she was anxious, and we know that Mary did not like mice; with snow on the roads the previous December, she and Wordsworth had walked to Ambleside “to buy mouse traps” and indeed, recorded Dorothy, “Mary fell & hurt her wrist” in the endeavor. Mousetraps were not enough; by the following year, in November 1803, Dorothy had capitulated:

we have got a little cat … We are almost over-run with Rats so were forced to get a cat, and I should now think that the house could scarcely have been right without one, if it were not for the Birds in the orchard.

(EY, 421)

We know of Dorothy's childhood feeling for birds from the poem “The Sparrow's Nest.” We know of her joy in robins when she was sixteen at Forncett: “how tame they are,” they “hop about the room,” two having “gone to rest” in the room (EY, 23). In the last Journal of 1834 there is the same delight and fear:

A tolerable day. Mr Pearson sends a beautiful white cat—My tears fall for Robin who had just treated me with his best song & perched on my table while I scattered for it its food.

(3 December 1834)

This robin perhaps survived the beautiful cat, for in February 1835 a robin rescues a Journal entry from its quite banal beginning: “I seem to have little or nothing to record. The weather in general unusually mild.” Then Dorothy picks up, and with something like her old flare for noting the quality of sound she turns to the song of the robin as it succeeded the general absence of birdsong in the few days of keen frost: “my own companion Robin cheared my bed-room with its slender subdued piping.” “Slender subdued piping”: this is simply true; it is also, in a way that is characteristic of Dorothy Wordsworth, an almost submerged allusion to a writer she had known well in her youth, Cowper. Like Jane Austen's Fanny Price, the young Dorothy Wordsworth had absorbed attitudes, even, in her letters, expressions, that derived from Cowper. Here, the circumstance of silence followed by the robin's “slender subdued piping” must have surfaced from a memory of Cowper's lines:

No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.
The redbreast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes, and more than half suppressed.

(The Task, 6.76-78)²¹

The sound of water. Dorothy could distinguish the different sounds of sykes—the little tumbling streams of the fells: “the sykes made a sweet sound everywhere … That little one above Mr Oliffs house was very impressive, a ghostly white serpent line—it made a sound most distinctly heard of itself” (22 February 1802). The valley could be “enlivened,” “populous” with streams (2 March 1802), and during that same spring, lying still and unseen by Wordsworth who was also lying by the wall of John's Grove, listening to April waterfalls, Dorothy distinguished “no one waterfall above another—it was a sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air” (29 April 1802). The populousness of water has become the voice of air; the elements are transfigured. The waterfalls have risen in stages to this apotheosis. The same thing happens to the water at the climax of that other April day in 1802, when Dorothy and Wordsworth came upon the wild daffodils by Ullswater.

Dorothy's first description of that walk is in a letter to Mary Hutchinson written as soon as they reached Grasmere the following evening. Mrs. Clarkson, wrote Dorothy, had soon parted from them and returned home, “for she durst not face the furious wind that blew against us. Indeed we could hardly stand it. If we had been going from home we certainly should have turned back, but we pushed on boldly. It sometimes almost took our breath away, we rested wherever we found a shelter, & reached Sty barrow Crag about sunset. A heavy rain came on” (EY, 350). The Journal account has so much more than the letter: it has boathouse and furze bush, plough and boat, cows and people and a climbing over a gate, hawthorns and birches and flower after flower, primroses, wood sorrel, anemone, starry yellow pilewort, and, added in an insertion, two more flowers—scentless violets and strawberries, and then, the wild daffodils. And the wind is more than a furious force in opposition; the flowers that “reeled & danced” seemed “as if they verily laughed with the wind”; the wind has become a partner in the dance. Dorothy added two clauses here, inserted additions to enforce the point that the wind was blowing over the lake to the daffodils, blowing directly to them. The power of this wind is registered not only by movement but by sound, by the various sounds of the waves: “we heard the waves at different distances & in the middle of the water like the Sea.” It is an immense power that dances with fragile flowers. None of this drama is in the letter.

Certainly Dorothy's eye and ear gave her the perceptions, and these come across the more vividly to us as they are described briefly. One of Dorothy's strengths was to write economically when it was required; and it was often required. Sometimes the Journal had to be written in odd corners of space that suddenly emerged. Wordsworth's late rising and daytime sleeps gave Dorothy several opportunities—but one could never know how long an opportunity might last. On Saturday, 19 June 1802, for instance, Wordsworth slept long: “I slept pretty well, but William has got no sleep. It is after 11 & he is still in bed—a fine morning—.” And then, the present moment apparently yielding no more, Dorothy launched into three distinct anecdotes: the one Coleridge had told her about the old Quaker woman who for years, when there was no longer a Keswick meeting, would regularly worship “alone, in that beautiful place among those fir-trees, in that spacious vale, under the great mountain Skiddaw”; the one about poor old Willy—“Hallo! as aught particular happened … Nay naught at aw nobbut auld Willy's dead,” dead apparently a pauper, having spent a little estate at Hawkshead and then been an ostler; then, immediately, the one about Miss Hudson, “O! I love flowers! I sow flowers in the Parks several miles from home & my mother & I visit them”—and the consequent temptation to excitement for botanists (such as Dorothy) as they come upon a rare out-of-place flower. The Journal was put down at this point, but had Wordsworth wakened sooner, there would no doubt have been one anecdote less. The entry for the rest of that Saturday was probably finished on Monday morning when “William was obliged to be in Bed late, he had slept so miserably.”

Sometimes, however, the stories of the poor people on the roads are set down with calm deliberation as Wordsworth's interest in them as possible subjects for poetry became clear; Dorothy's belated accounts of the beggar woman and her boys, and of the leech-gatherer have been discussed in the first section of this paper. She had begun to record local speech, often to great effect. Her portrait of the leech-gatherer, for example, ends with his own words that properly and naturally place his sufferings in the context of the sky and a dying light: “it was then ‘late in the evening—when the light was just going away.’”

Alongside Dorothy's pleasure in recording for Wordsworth was her genuine feeling for distress; this was always there. It meant that in 1808 she became the perfect recorder of the Green tragedy, and that, sporadically in her sporadic late Journal, long after Wordsworth needed stories for such poems as “Beggars,” “Repentance,” “Alice Fell,” “The Singing Bird,” “The Emigrant Mother,” the story of distress still appeared in the Journal. Here, as late as April 1834, is such a tale of pathos:

A sweet rich morning—I now sit with open window—Sarah Cookson below—My Flowers everlasting & very pretty. A poor Woman refused a lodging by Thomas Troughton on Tuesday night—slept with her Husband in Smelly hovel without straw or covering—next day proceeded & was delivered, by herself, of a dead Child on road near Quarry. The 2 Ws dining at Mr Hamiltons. I read Spectator & 2 sermons of Bp. H[orsley].

(2 April 1834)

But this is like an item of shocking news, the more shocking as at home, near the quarry. Dorothy had no direct contact with the destitute woman; there is no observed detail. In November 1801 she could give so much more: a woman on a night with snow upon the ground, traveling with a wounded husband, had been offered a bed at the Cock in Ambleside for 4d, had been sent to “one Harrison's where she & her husband had slept upon the hearth & bought a pennyworth of Chips for a fire,” and then Dorothy moves into direct speech, quoting the woman: “‘Aye’ says she ‘I was once an officers wife I, as you see me now.’” She had had £18 a year for teaching a school, but no fortune, and her husband's father “turned him out of doors.” In the West Indies the husband went to the war: “‘I had a Muslin gown on like yours—I seized hold of his coat as he went from me & slipped the joint of my finger—He was shot directly. I came to London & married this man. He was clerk to Judge Chambray, that man, that man thats going on the Road now.’” It is the price at the Cock, the pennyworth of shavings for a fire at Harrison's, the muslin gown like Dorothy's, the slipped finger joint as the wife tried to stop the husband from going, and that man on the road; these are part of the matter-of-fact base of the Journal.

The matter-of-fact starts up everywhere in Dorothy's writing: the windy birch tree, transcendent “like a flying sunshiny shower,” “like a Spirit of water,” exists alongside the honey that Peggy Ashburner sent Dorothy in return for a bit of goose in November 1801, and Peggy's sadness about the land they had been forced to sell is expressed in terms of cattle and sheep and of how she used to “gang out upon a hill & look ower t'fields & see them.” Peggy Ashburner's way of life nonetheless provides Dorothy with a realistic standard of endurable poverty. When Dorothy's cousin Tom Hutchinson was thinking of emigration to Van Diemen's land in 1821, “better,” wrote Dorothy, “live on oat-bread, milk & porridge by a fire-side like Peggy Ashburner's than go to such a banishment.”²²

The Journal's stories of the poor display a different facet of Dorothy's narrative art from that revealed in the well-told, frequently sardonic stories in the letters. There is some intention in these last to entertain, for the early nineteenth-century letter writer was generally aware that the recipient had to pay the postage, and Dorothy, even she, modest of her own writing as she was, did not feel the need to demur, as she does to Catherine Clarkson in November 1803: “I am afraid this letter is hardly worth the postage, and yet I think that when we are so far from you the sight of our handwriting alone would be worth a shilling” (EY, 423). Where there are not fully told (and passionately told) anecdotes, like that say of the rivalrous lopping of the branches and chopping of the trees on Nab Scar by the workmen respectively of Mr. North and Lady Fleming (6 May 1809; MY, 1:338), there are everywhere scattered crumbs of the concrete world: often there are both. A long letter of item after item of news for Sara Hutchinson in February 1815, for example, has suddenly a comic extended story—that of Wordsworth, Mary, and little Willy paying a visit to old Mrs. Knott, with The Excursion in hand, and indeed making a sale of the unlikely volume to this inappropriate reader. And at the end of the same letter, the actual moment of Dorothy's writing to Sara springs into concrete life: “it is 11 o'clock. William has been reading the Fairy Queen—he has laid aside his book and Mary has set about putting [on] her nightcap” (MY, 2: 204). Dorothy could pass sharp judgments on her fellow creatures and these are memorable as they are concrete. In 1826 she was disappointed with the new husband of the beautiful Miss Horrocks. Miss Horrocks had been with the Wordsworths on their continental tour of 1820, had climbed with Dorothy and Mary up the steep hill to the Castle at Heidelberg, and people “had more than once exclaimed, ‘Quelle belle Femme.’” Now in 1826 Miss Horrocks was married to a Dr. St. Clair: “I thought of a Gentleman's Butler at a well-covered Side-board,” wrote Dorothy, dismissing him (LY, 427). There was always a potential for the caustic in Dorothy's writing and it can be glimpsed even in the last Journals, overwhelmed as they are with the illness and deaths of others and with her own imprisoning pain. She could be “starved to marble” on a cold night in the winter of 1835 when there was no going out, no meeting people outside, nothing visual beyond the garden and the landscape from the window, dependent on gossip that came to her. And she could still be sharply judgmental:

Old James Fleming is on his death-bed & Tommy Black is dead—Two days before I heard of his extreme sufferings from Mary Fisher. His wife has now no incombrance & doubtless will go on adding by hard labour to her little heap of Cash—her one prize—but perhaps a stop may soon be put to this as she may find it easy enough to get a young Husband to spend for her. The weather has been dry all the week.

(30 March 1835)

Yet sharp though this is, it demonstrates yet again that Dorothy's brilliance as a writer was always best when she stayed within the limits of her own eye and ear; she could not make up worlds, nor does her writing often leap outside the world she sees to an imaginative world of metaphor; nor can she too successfully take on the passions of others, even of Wordsworth, when her own experience was not involved. Sitting at old Mrs. Strickland's window in March 1818, Dorothy had watched the entry of Henry Brougham, the Whig candidate, into Kendal. In the letter (already quoted) she wrote a description of it; indeed, Wordsworth sent a copy to Lord Lonsdale. Dorothy describes Brougham as looking “ready to lead a gang of Robespierrists set to pull down Lowther Castle,” and as having “nothing of a Westmoreland countenance. I could have fancied him one of the French Demagogues of the Tribunal of Terror at certain times, when he gathered a particular fierceness into his face. He is very like a Frenchman” (MY, 2:443). This fancying and fearing a revival of revolutionary violence is more Wordsworth's than Dorothy's; she has enough jeering sharpness to write propaganda copy, but this is far from being her natural home. Her experience had been too different from Wordsworth's; while he, in October 1792, was in Paris after the September Massacres and striving to retain his radical hopes, the young Dorothy was meeting the king of England and his family at Windsor, and loving them: “I own I am too much of an aristocrate or what you please to call me, not to reverence him because he is a Monarch more than I should were he a private Gentleman”; she spoke of “the new-fangled Doctrine of Liberty and Equality” (EY, 83). Wordsworth had had to suffer his change of political heart; Dorothy had never had such hope or such disillusion; politics altogether sat lightly upon her. A single image will demonstrate why we perhaps feel uncomfortable in 1818 when Dorothy moves out of her own experience to wear Wordsworth's political hat. In March 1802 Dorothy had written in her Journal:

When William was at Keswick I saw Jane Ashburner driving the Cow along the high road from the well where she had been watering it she had a stick in her hand & came tripping along in the Jig step, as if she were dancing—Her presence was bold & graceful, her cheeks flushed with health & her countenance was free & gay.

(12 March 1802)

Dorothy must have liked her picture of Jane Ashburner and the cow because the first long sentence here has been carefully improved by a deletion and insertions: the phrase “along the high road” has been added, and the original “watering it with a stick in her hand tripping along in the Jig step” has had two verbs inserted. And if, as is likely, Dorothy told Wordsworth of this, or if he read her account, he must have been reminded of how different it had been in France ten years before when he and his friend Beaupuis had chanced

One day to meet a hunger-bitten Girl,
Who crept along, fitting her languid self
Unto a Heifer's motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the Girl with her two hands
Was busy knitting, in a heartless mood
Of solitude, and at the sight my Friend
In agitation said, “Tis against that
Which we are fighting”. …

(Prelude [1805], 9.512-20)

Jane Ashburner's happiness and her health (from her diet of oatbread, milk and porridge?) would only spur Wordsworth's indignation as he came to write about the appalling poverty in France. The contrast measures also the gap between Wordsworth's and Dorothy's experience of dire poverty and it indicates the effort she had to make to write with overt political intention.

The Journal does not exert political pressure. It is not directed toward moving any reader to public action; Wordsworth was the only reader envisaged, and his sympathies were known. Yet the people who came to the door of the cottage at Town End are affecting because we can tell that they affected Dorothy; she gave to them, and she wrote about them so carefully. There is a long entry for instance for 12 February 1802; the first part of this records old Molly's joy at little Sally Ashburner's joy at going to visit at Mr. Simpson's in a new bed-gown, a very bonny one, “Sally & me's in Luck.” This was written during the bright clear hard frost of that morning. The second part, written probably the following day, with Wordsworth, “still at work at the Pedlar, altering & refitting,” was given a good deal of space and time. Molly and Sally, admittedly, were poor enough people, but they had homes and a recognized and respected place in their society; Dorothy writes, on the heels of their happiness, an account of a poor woman who came “she said to beg some rags for her husbands leg which had been wounded by a slate from the Roof in the great wind.” Dorothy had met this woman before—“she has often come here”; her complexion had been beautiful “but now she looks broken, & her little Boy, a pretty little fellow, & whom I have loved for the sake of Basil, looks thin & pale.” So, Dorothy's memory—and ours—goes back to little Basil Montagu, a lucky child much cared for and loved at Racedown. “Aye says [the woman] we have all been ill. Our house was unroofed in the storm recently.” Dorothy then, on that February morning, evokes the summer of eighteen months before when she had seen the child “walking lazily in the deep narrow lane, overshadowed with the hedge-rows … going ‘a laiting’.” She had indeed in mid-June 1800 noticed him, a “pretty little Boy,” walking in a valley “all perfumed with the Gale & wild thyme, … the woods … veined with rich yellow Broom … a primrose in blossom.” That the contrast affected Dorothy is clear from her lingering on it, making four tiny changes of expression (of the order of “hanging over his shoulder” to “hung over his shoulder,” and returning to insert the sentence about the child's still wearing the same coat, now, “a ragged drab coat”). Dorothy then comments, “I could not help thinking that we are not half thankful enough that we are placed in that condition of life in which we are.” She records the present weather, so different from the summer that has been recalled: “The snow still lies upon the ground,” and then, in the same Journal entry, comes a final image of struggle and poverty, a family passing the door “just at the closing in of the Day”:

I heard a cart pass the door, & at the same time the dismal sound of a crying Infant. I went to the window & had light enough to see that a man was driving a cart which seemed not to be very full, & that a woman with an infant in her arms was following close behind & a dog close to her. It was a wild & melancholy sight.

It made Dorothy return and insert another sentence about the woman who had begged earlier; she squeezed between the lines the words, “This woman's was but a common case.” The power of the entry as a whole lies in Dorothy's relation with and movement into deepening poverty. It is not a movement toward action but into an intensifying of sympathy. She moves from happy neighborly and domestic involvement with cheerful Molly's “Luck” and little Sally's excitement at the bonny dress and visiting, to talking with the woman with the child and wounded husband, to her remembrance of them in easier summer days, her sense of their worsening plight, and finally, in growing darkness and snow, to her own silent standing and looking through a window as a man pushing a cart, a woman, a crying child and a dog pass by into the night. Dorothy returns to her own world: candles were lighted, “William rubbed his Table,” before wearing himself and Dorothy out with labor at “The Pedlar.” Wordsworth had, on occasion, dug a little, cleaned out the well, cleared a path to the necessary, added a step to the orchard steps, gone to work in the garden with the dung, cut down the winter cherry, cut wood a little, helped plant the bower, nailed up the trees, raked a few stones off the garden, but this is his only activity within the house that Dorothy records: the polishing of his writing table. It was not until 1811 that Wordsworth acquired a writing desk, “what I most wanted,” he wrote to Sara Hutchinson (MY, 1: 510), who gave him the desk. Meanwhile, in February 1802, a day of no walking but of work and labor at “The Pedlar,” he rubbed his table. This perhaps held the place for Wordsworth of that “one oaken cupboard” in poor Sarah Green's scantily furnished house, a cupboard “so bright with rubbing,” wrote Dorothy in her narrative, “that it was plain it had been prized as an ornament and a Treasure.”²³ The Wordsworths sat a long time with the windows unclosed that February evening, keeping in their candlelit room an awareness of the dark. They had, said Dorothy, “an affecting conversation.” We must suppose that the affecting conversation was connected with the approaching change—Wordsworth's marriage, but for us, readers of the private Journal, the affecting conversation comes also as a natural sequence in the play of feeling of the entire day—its poor people, their lights and growing darknesses, and Dorothy's care for such human unsuccess so absolutely demonstrated in her care to record it.

There is no conclusion to a Journal. Of its nature, it is not concluded. It has no single style of writing. After the last full entry of the Grasmere Journal, the one for 16 January 1803, the word Monda[y] is begun, but the last letter is omitted and there is a drawing in ink of a chair, some two inches in height, badly drawn so that it appears to be standing on one leg. The chair is thoroughly inconsequent, as is that picture of Wordsworth polishing his table in candlelight, his mind full of “The Pedlar,” Dorothy laboring with him to write out the poem and aware of those unfortunates of the day who had passed by. There is no higher praise for the Journal in its several styles than that it is, in Dorothy's own word, “affecting,” that it can affect us as poetry does.

Notes

1. Quotations from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals are from the manuscripts and are identified in the text by date of entry. To consult the complete Grasmere text, see my annotated edition of Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). I am grateful to my fellow trustees of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, for permission to quote from these manuscripts.

2. For the text of “Beggars” and the variants see Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807, by William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 113-16; hereafter PTV, with page numbers cited in the text.

3. The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith J. Morley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 1:53.

4. The Works of the British Poets, ed. Robert Anderson, 13 vols. (London, 1797), 2:575; hereafter BP, with volume and page numbers cited in the text.

5. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: Black, 1889-90), 3:27.

6. The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler (Harlow: Longman, 1968).

7. See The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940-49), 4:217-28.

8. The Letters of John Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 123.

9. Anderson, British Poets, 11:1027-34.

10. Bruce, like Logan, could have fitted into the company of the “Leech-gatherer” poets. In later life, again discussing Burns and Chatterton and the value of raising monuments to them in their native places, Wordsworth wrote: “I should also be glad to see a monument erected on the banks of Lochleven to the memory of the innocent, and tender-hearted Michael Bruce, who, after a short life spent in poverty and obscurity, was called away too early to leave behind him more than a few trustworthy promises of pure affection and unvitiated imagination” (21 April 1819); in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2d ed., The Middle Years, Part 2: 1812-1820, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 535; hereafter MY 2, with page numbers cited in the text.

11. Anderson, British Poets, 11:1035.

12. The first 1802 version was:

    While I am lying on the grass,
    I hear thy restless shout
    From hill to hill it seems to pass,
    About, and all about!

    (ll. 5-8)

    For the text see PTV, 213-14. The “restless shout” by 1814 had achieved its characteristic dual effect:

    From hill to hill it seems to pass
    At once far off and near. …

    (ll. 7-8)

    These lines were kept in Poems (1815), but the “restless shout” of line 6 had become “Thy loud noise smites my ear.” By 1820 the “hill to hill” of line 7 had gone, to be replaced by “It seems to fill the whole air's space.” In 1827 Wordsworth came close to the final version:

    While I am lying on the grass
    Thy twofold shout I hear,
    That seems to fill the whole air's space
    As loud far off as near.

    Finally, in 1845, the twofold shout of the bird with its curious deceptiveness of distance is restored to the landscape of hills. As his own cuckoo was a presence for Wordsworth into late life, so was that other cuckoo of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. That too made progress toward a reality. The text in Anderson that Wordsworth used in 1801, assuming, as everyone did, that the poem was Chaucer's, was in any case corrupt, and when Wordsworth, urged by Thomas Powell, came to prepare his version of the poem in 1839-40 for R. H. Horne's Chaucer Modernised (1841), he took the precaution, possibly when he was in Oxford for his honorary degree in 1839, to check the text “from a manuscript in the Bodleian.” He discovered differences from Anderson: two verses indeed, “which are necessary to complete the sense,” added Wordsworth in a footnote (Poetical Works, 4: 224-25). In Anderson the nightingale, the constant servant of love, finally weeps and longs for vengeance on the churlish cuckoo who, contemptuous of love and lovers alike, simply (and unaccountably) flies away. This was Wordsworth's version in 1801, true to Anderson:

    Methought that he did then start up anon,
    And glad was I, in truth, that he was gone,
    And ever as the Cuckoo flew away
    He cried out farewell, farewell Popinjay
    As though he had been scorning me alone.

    By 1841 the dreamer, an old man who clearly cannot bear any mockery of his lifelong devotion to love, behaves in a thoroughly realistic, though disturbingly violent way, toward the cuckoo. This bird is now reminiscent of Wordsworth's bird in To the Cuckoo hunted by a schoolboy who searched and looked “a thousand ways / In bush, and tree, and sky.” Wordsworth's corrected version of the medieval was now:

    And so methought I started up anon,
    And to the brook I ran and got a stone,
    Which at the Cuckoo hardily I cast,
    And he for dread did fly away full fast;
    And glad, in sooth, was I when he was gone.

    And as he flew, the Cuckoo, ever and aye,
    Kept crying, “Farewell!—farewell, Popinjay!”
    As if in scornful mockery of me;
    And on I hunted him from tree to tree,
    Till he was far, all out of sight, away.

13. The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell (London, 1840), 1-2.

14. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1938), 1:85, 90.

15. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2d ed., The Middle Years, Part 1: 1806-1811, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 467; hereafter MY 1, with page numbers cited in the text.

16. See Jared R. Curtis, Wordsworth's Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 97-113 and 187-95.

17. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2d ed., The Early Years, 1787-1805, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 538; hereafter EY, with page numbers cited in the text.

18. The Letters of Sara Hutchinson, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954), 372.

19. The Cookson daughters, incidentally, and their mother, from the early 1840s, lived in Grasmere, in their new house, How Foot, the house that will become, it is hoped, the future Wordsworth Library.

20. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 2:371.

21. The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. T. S. Grimshawe (London, 1845), 264.

22. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2d ed., The Later Years, Part 1: 1821-1828, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 50; hereafter LY, with page numbers cited in text.

23. Dorothy Wordsworth, George & Sarah Green: A Narrative, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 55.