SOURCE: Barstow, Marjorie Latta. “The Lyrical Ballads.” In Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction, pp. 141-82. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917.

Although Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction had a sounder basis in literary tradition and in psychology than an ignorant world of letters was prepared to admit, his own application of it, in its first extreme form, was very limited in time and in extent. Only in the “Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads” of 1798 does he say that he means to employ the ‘language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’; and only in this volume does he actually succeed in doing so. But even here he makes use of this language simply as an ‘experiment,’ and clearly indicates that the experiment applies only to a part—though a major part—of the collection.

The poems composing the minority, not included under Wordsworth's definition of his purpose, are easily determined. Apart from the contributions of Coleridge, and apart from “Tintern Abbey,” which, as Wordsworth himself indicates, was composed in the loftier and more impassioned strain of the ode,¹ they prove to be the poems written before 1797—the “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree,” “The Female Vagrant,” the “Lines written near Richmond,” and the “Convict”—none of which show any trace of the ballad-literature. One other poem in the volume shows virtually nothing of this influence. This is the “Old Man Travelling,” which occupies a unique place in the first edition. It is the only representative of a type of delineation of rustic life in blank verse which developed side by side with the Lyrical Ballads, but which does not otherwise appear in print till the volumes of 1800. The remaining poems in the first edition form a homogeneous group, clearly reflecting the literary influence suggested in the title, and the theory of poetic diction suggested in the “Advertisement.” They are the real experiment—the attempt to co-ordinate the artless art of the ballads with Wordsworth's own observation of the psychological processes underlying the speech of simple men; the rest are merely poems written in various moods and in various styles.

This group of the true Lyrical Ballads falls into four main divisions:

1. Philosophical and narrative poems in the metre, and, to a certain extent, the style of the ballads, but wholly differing from them in substance.

(a) Philosophical and reflective poems, in which the narrative element is at a minimum:

“Lines written in Early Spring”

“Lines written at a Small Distance from my House”

“Expostulation and Reply”

“The Tables Turned.”

(b) Narrative poems in the nature of simple anecdotes designed to illustrate a philosophical truth that is far less simple:

“We are Seven”

“Anecdote for Fathers”

“Simon Lee.”

2. Narrative and lyrical poems, less recondite in thought, but written in a ‘more impressive metre than is usual in the Ballads’²:

(a) Poems more narrative than lyrical:

“Goody Blake and Harry Gill”

“The Idiot Boy”

(Peter Bell).

(b) Poems in which the lyrical element tends to predominate, or does wholly predominate (characterized by the use of the refrain):

“The Thorn”

“The Last of the Flock”

“The Mad Mother”

“The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman.”

The last group most obviously illustrate Wordsworth's suggested definition of a lyrical ballad, as a narrative poem in which the ‘feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling,’³ though this description applies to all the poems.

In these several groups of poems, there are some distinct peculiarities of language which are directly traceable to the combined influence of the Reliques and the speech of rustics, and which, for better or for worse, had a far-reaching influence upon Wordsworth's poetic diction.

As we have already said, by language Wordsworth apparently meant, not vocabulary alone, but the whole body and dress of thought—all that appears to the eye and ear when (if we may say this without irreverence) the word becomes flesh, and takes its place among things that have a material, as well as a spiritual existence. But the unit of expression, for all practical purposes, is generally the individual term—words, in the usual sense; and hence any influence affecting language does first of all affect the vocabulary. Accordingly, we will begin with the vocabulary of these Lyrical Ballads, and proceed thence to the more important matters of syntax, and of narrative and lyrical technique.

1. VOCABULARY.

At first glance, the vocabulary of the Lyrical Ballads does not seem to be notable. Apart from a number of colloquial expressions, it is a pure, clear vocabulary of concrete words, neither more nor less simple than the language of the majority of poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse. But when we examine it in the light of the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, even this fact becomes interesting.

As has already been said, the two poets had some notion that there was a permanent body of English words—the names of common things and universal emotions—which had remained comparatively unaltered since the days of Chaucer. This was the generally intelligible language of poetry which the eighteenth century had always endeavored to discover—a language ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate.’ This contention is fully justified by the Lyrical Ballads. Although Wordsworth's avowed effort is to imitate the language that he daily hears on the lips of unlearned men, stanza after stanza of the most typical Wordsworthian verse in this volume contain only words that may be found in Skeat's glossary to Chaucer. This is true, for instance, of the description of the little cottage girl:

I met a little cottage girl,
          She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl(4)
          That clustered round her head,(5)

and of ‘the wonderful lines—quam nihil ad genium naucleri’ which Hutchinson chooses as the supreme example of a case in which the ‘lineaments of the poet peep out through his clumsy disguise’⁶:

At all times of the day or night
This wretched woman thither goes,
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows.(7)

Even when the poet is writing more philosophically, he still seems to find the vocabulary of Chaucer not inadequate. In the stanza,

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
          Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
          —We murder to dissect,(8)

only the word ‘dissect’⁹ is entirely unknown to his master. Of course there are many cases in which this is not so. Rustic¹⁰ in the line, ‘She had a rustic woodland air,’ and intermitted¹¹ in the line, ‘And held such intermitted talk,’ are not Chaucerian. The remarkable thing is that he should have come so near the vocabulary of the ‘first finder of our fair language,’ when he was writing in accordance with a theory in which the imitation of Chaucer was merely an incidental suggestion by Coleridge. It is certainly a proof of the essential soundness of this new conception of the universal language of poetry that, after so many centuries, some of the most characteristic expressions of an imagination so individual as that of Wordsworth should be strictly in the vocabulary of Chaucer.¹²

While this attempt to find the really permanent element in the English language was undoubtedly the most valuable feature of the new theory, there is abundant evidence that Wordsworth himself was more especially interested in the artistic possibilities of exclusively colloquial turns of expression. These occur chiefly in the poems in which there is a somewhat dramatic attempt to imitate the manners, as well as the emotions, of humble characters. By far the largest proportion of them is found in “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” and “The Idiot Boy,” as well as in the later, unpublished poem of “The Tinker,” which belongs to the same type, and in the first edition of Peter Bell, which, though not printed until 1819, is a true lyrical ballad. Where the emotional and lyrical element begins to predominate, these colloquialisms tend to disappear, as in “The Thorn” and “The Last of the Flock.” This is a rather interesting fact—a possibly unintentional illustration of Wordsworth's own belief that the universal language is the language of the heart. One would naturally expect to find colloquialisms in a dramatic lyric, where the poet is speaking through the mouth of a humble character, rather than in a narrative, where he speaks in his own person. But the half-humorous observation of external manners lowers the style, while emotion raises and universalizes it. This is especially true in the case of “The Mad Mother,” whose pathetic song is not sullied by any of the curious importations from vulgar speech that are so frequent in “The Idiot Boy.”

The colloquialisms are of two sorts. There are words which are chiefly confined to speech; and there are words which, though frequent in literature and capable of beautiful and noble uses, are employed in the Lyrical Ballads in a manner not common outside of conversation. The colloquialisms of the first type have generally an onomatopoetic value. In the earlier descriptive poems, Wordsworth had already showed a special interest in words expressive of sound. To those which he there employed he has now added a choice collection of more homely creations of this kind:

Said Peter to the groaning Ass,
          But I will bang your bones.(13)
With his visage grim and sooty,
          Bumming, bumming, bumming.(14)
Burr, burr, now Johnny's lips they burr.(15)
The owlets hoot, the owlets curr.(16)

In such cases, as will be noticed, he often increases the effect of the word by repetition:

She lifts the knocker—rap, rap, rap.(17)
Then his hammer he rouzes,
          Batter! batter! batter!(18)
His teeth they chatter, chatter still.(19)

In addition to the words thus definitely expressing sound, there is a large number of words more vaguely onomatopoetic in character, all of which have the same homely rhythm, dimly suggestive of Mother Goose—fiddle-faddle, hob-nob, hurly-burly, flurry, bowzes, pother, etc. In such lines as

Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob(20);
It dried her body like a cinder,
And almost turned her brain to tinder,(21)

there is a touch of honest vulgarity which is characteristic of “The Tinker” throughout. Nothing in his published work so completely reveals the strain of rustic good nature in Wordsworth, unmodified by any higher touches of poetry, as this piece, with its cheerful rude metre and unpolished phrases²²:

Who leads a happy life
If it's not the merry Tinker?
Not too old to have a wife;
Not too much a thinker.
Right before the Farmer's door
Down he sits; his brows he knits;
Then his hammer he rouzes;
          Batter! batter! batter!
He begins to clatter;
And while the work is going on
          Right good ale he bowzes.(23)

But this poem was withheld from print, and the style employed in it was seldom allowed to appear in Wordsworth's poetry after the Lyrical Ballads. In “Benjamin the Waggoner,” his most successful attempt at humor, something of a broadly, rudely playful sympathy with the foibles of a humble sinner is retained; but it is expressed in language so pure and limpid that it would not disgrace Chaucer's own well of English undefiled. Many of the colloquial words just listed were omitted in correction,²⁴ and do not appear in the Concordance at all. Others were never used after the appearance of the Lyrical Ballads.²⁵ Wordsworth eliminated the over-colloquial elements from his vocabulary, as carefully as he removed the pedantic or bookish expressions from the early descriptive poems. The former are as little characteristic of his mature style as the latter.

Most of the colloquial words had some artistic justification in their onomatopoetic value; but this can hardly be said of many phrases of the same type—‘not a whit the better he,’ ‘I fear you're in a dreadful way,’ ‘in a mighty fret,’ ‘in a mighty flurry,’

Sad case, as you may think,
For very cold to go to bed,
And then for cold not sleep a wink,

etc. Most of these also were rejected by Wordsworth's mature taste.²⁶ Nothing could give a better idea of the almost uniform nobility of his style than to look up words like dreadful, fret, mighty, etc., in the Concordance, and to find the quotation from the Lyrical Ballads standing out in lonely contrast to such lines as

Implores the dreadful untried sleep of death.(27)
Dim dreadful faces through the gloom appear.(28)
I love the brooks which down their channels fret.(29)
And see the children sport upon the shore
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.(30)
And these perennial bowers and murmuring pines
Be gracious as the music and the bloom
And all the mighty ravishment of spring.(31)

This fullness of content, this imaginative dignity, are the really typical features of Wordsworth's style, whether he is borrowing his actual words from a peasant or from Shakespeare. This he himself realized more and more.³² However, at the beginning, his interest in the poor and lowly made him forget that he was using them as types, and their language as a universal expression of universal feelings, rather than as an external mark of a single class, and a single stage of culture. When he takes a line of genuine poetry—of pure and emotional English—directly from the lips of a peasant,³³ as he sometimes does, we are grateful indeed for the gift; but where this essentially poetical character is lacking, the language of the country villager is not in itself preferable to that of the polite Londoner. The real value of the language of the Lyrical Ballads is not that it is the speech of ‘the lower and middle classes of society,’ but that it is universal language of the heart in permanent and universal English words.

2. SYNTAX.

When we turn from the study of words per se to their logical relation to each other in the sentence—i. e., the syntax, we find that the combined influence of the Reliques and of Wordsworth's new principles had a much more distinct, and possibly a deleterious, influence upon his poetic style. He was indeed successful in discovering a vocabulary common to the speech of the peasant and that of the scholar—to elder poetry and modern conversation; and this vocabulary he used with precision. Accordingly, there was comparatively little for him to reject in the words employed in the Lyrical Ballads; they formed a nucleus for a larger and richer and more expressive poetic diction. With syntax it was not so. In endeavoring to imitate the intellectual processes of the simple mind, he lost sight of the natural and logical relations of thought to thought, usually expressed by syntax, and the necessity of preserving these relations in any adequate expression.

As Coleridge said³⁴: ‘We do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it may be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole.’ The uneducated man does not look forward, and see the end of his speech beyond the beginning. He goes on adding thought to thought as they come, and connecting subordinate and co-ordinate ideas indifferently by ‘and,’ or leaving them wholly disconnected.³⁵ His emphasis is the emphasis of feeling alone, and, as Wordsworth noticed, he expresses this emphasis simply by repeating the important idea again and again—not by any attempt to subordinate the less important things to it. The result is that his speech has exactly the qualities that Coleridge discovered in too much of Wordsworth's poetry—‘prolixity, repetition, and an eddying instead of a progression of thought.’³⁶ Yet this emotional rather than intellectual syntax has its worth for the poet; and for one who had sought a greater flexibility in the imitation of classical Latin, the discovery of the possibilities of variety and expressiveness in his own native idiom was invaluable.

The result of reproducing the syntax of the unlearned was not unlike the result of imitating their vocabulary. As the words that Wordsworth uses are the words of Chaucer, so his syntax is the syntax of a still earlier period. What Kellner says³⁷ of the prose of Alfred exactly describes the construction of sentences in the Lyrical Ballads: ‘Alfred changes his construction in consequence of every change going on in his mind, while in a modern author the flow of the ideas is checked by the ready pattern of the syntactical construction. … The syntax of older periods is natural, naïf—that is, it follows much more closely the drift of the ideas, of mental images; the diction, therefore, looks as if it were extemporised, as if written on the spur of the moment, while modern syntax, fettered by logic, is artificial, the result of literary tradition, and therefore, far from being a true mirror of what is going on in the mind.’³⁷ To follow more closely ‘the drift of ideas, of mental images,’ to make his language a true mirror of what is going on in the mind, especially of the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement—this was the object of Wordsworth in some of the much derided mannerisms in the Lyrical Ballads. As he himself said, he always had ‘a worthy purpose.’

The effect of emotion (or lack of thought) on syntax is manifest in various types of sentences in the Lyrical Ballads, from the struggling attempt to relate subject to predicate to the unavailing effort to create structures at once complex and unified. Even the most simple sentence is an intellectual achievement. The fusing of the ideas of subject and predicate in one organic whole often presents an almost insuperable difficulty to the uncultivated or excited mind. This is illustrated in one of the most frequent mannerisms of uneducated speech, which is also a special feature of the style of the popular ballads. When it occurs in literature, it is often copied from them.

The dynt yt was both sad and sar.(38)
The yerlle of Fyffe, withowghten stryffe
He bowynd hym over Sulway.(39)
Then forthe Syr Cauline he was ledde.(40)
And Scarlette he was flyinge afoote.(41)

The mind, in its interest in the subject, tends to lose sight of the predicate, and to cling to the image suggested by the substantive. In order to proceed, it has to take a fresh start, so to speak, with the pronoun representing the substantive, and so quickly pass to the verb. Examples of this syntactical peculiarity are very frequent in the Lyrical Ballads,⁴² where it appears for the first time in Wordsworth's poetry.

The eye it cannot chuse but see.(43)
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.(44)
Your limbs they are alive.(45)
The pony he is mild and good.(46)
Shame on me, Sir! this lusty lamb,
He makes my tears to flow.(47)
The owlet in the moonlight air,
He shouts from nobody knows where.(48)
The doctor he has made him wait.(49)
The babe I carry on my arm,
He saves for me my precious soul.(50)
Alas! alas! that look so wild,
It never, never came from me.(51)

The peculiar mannerism of style here illustrated was one that Wordsworth took few pains to correct in the later editions of these poems. The lines ‘His ancles, they are swoln and thick,’⁵² become:

His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swoln and thick.

In the lines

The owlet in the moonlight air
He shouts from nobody knows where,(53)

he is omitted; and the line, ‘And Susan she begins to fear,’⁵⁴ is changed to ‘And Susan now begins to fear.’ The line, ‘Her face it was enough for me,’⁵⁵ is altered by punctuation—‘Her face! it was enough for me.’ But otherwise these lines remain as they first stood through all Wordsworth's attempts to correct his poems.

In Wordsworth's conversion of the line, ‘Her face it was enough for me,’ to ‘Her face! it was enough for me,’ by simply changing the punctuation, another type of syntax closely related to the one just mentioned is illustrated. Here the substantive stands by itself, or is connected with the preceding statement, and the pronominal subject and its predicate follow as a kind of explanation of the emotion implied in the single word and the mark of exclamation. Though this type is sometimes distinguished from the other only by punctuation, it represents a somewhat different psychological process. The intense concentration of the mind on the subject and all it suggests is more frankly represented, and the break between this and what follows is complete. This type of syntax occurs much less frequently than the other in the Lyrical Ballads. The following are examples of it:

All day she spun in her poor dwelling,
And then her three hours work at night!
Alas! 'twas hardly worth the telling.(56)
And then the wind! in faith, it was
A wind full ten times over.(57)
But when the pony moved his legs,
Oh! then for the poor idiot boy!
For joy he cannot hold the bridle.(58)

The difficulty in joining the two members of the sentence, resulting, in these cases, from the interest that the mind takes in the subject to the exclusion of the predicate, may also be caused by a special interest in the predicate. In this case, also, there is an attempt to strengthen the relation between the two by reduplicating the subject. These two types of reduplication are thus illustrated and described by Kellner:

Your husband he is gone to save far off,
Whilst others come to make him lose at home.

—Shakespeare.

She early left her sleepless bed,
The fairest maid of Teviotdale.

—Scott.

‘These instances illustrate two different psychological processes, and accordingly two different constructions. In the first case, the subject is foremost in the consciousness of the speaker, and the other idea connected with it, viz., the predicate, is dimmed for a moment, so that it takes the speaker some time to catch hold of it again. In the second case, the speaker is so much under the impression of what he is going to predicate, that he forgets for a moment to tell the person addressed what he is predicating about, and it takes some time until he finds out his mistake. In both cases there is a distinct pause between the two expressions for the same subject; in both cases the hearer has the impression that there is some emotion at work in the mind of the speaker. Both these circumstances make the expression a favorite figure of speech.’⁵⁹

This second type of reduplication is also not uncommon in the Lyrical Ballads⁶⁰:

Not higher than a two years' child,
It stands erect, this aged thorn.(61)
Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather
That he had died, that cruel father!(62)
Alas! 'tis very little, all
Which they can do between them.(63)

A reduplication whose psychological cause is very similar occurs when the interest in the predicate temporarily obscures the object:

Alas! I should have had him still,
My Johnny, till my dying day.(64)

Sometimes, however, the reduplication is really due to a quick mental conversion of the subject into the object.

Thy lips, I feel them, baby.(65)
And this poor thorn they clasp it round.(66)

But these are only simple examples of constructions that occur in more complicated forms—forms which often come very near the line where the broken emotional syntax passes over into a more sustained intellectual structure. The suggestion of sustained thought immediately converts an apparent reduplication into a familiar literary device:

Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob,
They lengthen out the tremulous sob.(67)
Even he, of cattle the most mild,
The pony had his share.(68)
Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy.(69)

In these cases the pronoun seems to be used, not in a somewhat helpless and impulsive effort to keep hold of the subject, but with deliberate forethought. In the first quotation, ‘fond lovers’ is in intentional apposition with ‘they’; in the two others, the pronoun seems to be used to point forward to the substantive, which is purposely withheld for a moment, instead of being parenthetically inserted on second thought. Such nice gradations suggest the more intellectual uses to which Wordsworth's practice in imitating the untaught cadence of extemporaneous speech could be put. In the end it gave him a fine and flexible instrument.

But if the mind in which feeling triumphs over thought has some difficulty in fusing the primary elements of a sentence into an organic whole, it waxes increasingly helpless as it attempts to relate the larger units thus formed. Often there is no such attempt. The simple units are merely placed side by side, as in a child's first reader: ‘I have a cat. My cat is white. My cat eats rats.’ This is a favorite method in the Lyrical Ballads:

Her eyes are wild, her head is bare,
The sun had burnt her coal-black hair;
Her eyebrows have a rusty stain,
And she came far from over the main.
She has a baby on her arm.(70)
I met a little cottage girl,
She was eight years old, she said.(71)
I have a boy of five years old,
His face is fair and fresh to see;
His limbs are cast in beauty's mould,
And dearly he loves me.(72)

When the conjunctive and is used, it is inserted rather casually, as in ordinary speech, and does not connect the ideas in the series that are most closely related to each other.

Where every statement has exactly the same structure, there is, of course, no emphasis, no indication of proportion and relation. But this is generally expressed by the continual repetition, with changes and augmentations, of the fact uppermost in the mind of the speaker. Apart from the first group of philosophical poems, most of the Lyrical Ballads are wonderful complexes of such repetitions; the thoughts seem to be woven together, appearing and disappearing like the different colored threads in a carpet. Of this type of structure, “The Thorn” is the best example. In the first stanza, for instance, note how the two principal features of the thorn—its age and its erectness—are intertwined with a continually increasing number of illustrative details.

There is a thorn; it looks so old,
In truth you'd find it hard to say,
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and grey.
Not higher than a two years' child,
It stands erect this aged thorn;
No leaves it has, no thorny points;
It is a mass of knotted joints,
A wretched thing forlorn.
It stands erect, and like a stone
With lichens it is overgrown.(73)

A closer relation between the independent assertions is attempted in the parenthetical structure so frequent in conversation. Instead of employing subordinate clauses and modifying phrases, the details are inserted into the midst of other statements, just as they occur to the mind, each in the form of a complete little sentence:

His head he raised—there was in sight,
It caught his eye, he saw it plain—
Upon the house-top, glittering bright,
A broad and gilded vane.(74)
Tis now some two and twenty years,
Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
Gave with a maiden's true good-will
Her company to Stephen Hill.(75)

Sometimes, when a complex sentence is almost achieved, the subordinate clause has a tendency to detach itself and become independent, as in the following case:

There's not a mother, no not one,
But when she hears what you have done,
Oh! Betty she'll be in a fright.(76)

In this sentence the logical relation of the separate parts might be expressed thus: ‘There is not a mother who will not be in a fright when she hears what you have done.’ But in his excitement, the speaker loses track of the relation of the last clause to the first, and lets it emerge into greater independence. The disposition to make each idea a separate assertion is also visible in the line,

In Johnny's left-hand you may see
The green bough's motionless and dead,(77)

as compared with the more intellectual and literary construction to which Wordsworth altered it:

In Johnny's left-hand you may see
The green bough motionless and dead.

Sometimes, too, there is a connecting word used loosely to refer to an idea in the mind of the speaker not explicitly expressed:

She talked and sung the woods among,
And it was in the English tongue.(78)

Often relation is merely suggested rather than clearly indicated:

Proud of herself, and proud of him,
She sees him in his travelling trim;
How quietly her Johnny goes.(79)

Even when a complex sentence is actually constructed, it is sometimes necessary to bind the parts together by a reduplication not unlike that employed in the joining of subject and predicate. As in the one case a pronoun was used to refer to the substantive, so in this an adverb, pointing back to the subordinate conjunction, is inserted in the principal clause:

But when the ice our streams did fetter,
Oh then how her old bones would shake.(80)
Now, though he knows poor Johnny well,
Yet for his life he cannot tell
What he has got upon his back.(81)

But to list all the peculiarities of impulsive speech to be found in the Lyrical Ballads is impossible. We might speak of the flexible order of words—of inversions, not arbitrary and unidiomatic, as in the descriptive poems, but natural and expressive; of the trick of repeating adjectives or adverbs⁸²; or of repeating the noun with some added modifier⁸³; of the use of a noun for an adjective (‘His face was gloom; his heart was sorrow’),⁸⁴ etc.; but this would swell our study to unwieldy dimensions. Just because Wordsworth is trying to write as men talk—to register in the syntax all the shifting ideas and currents of emotion—it is very difficult to classify his constructions. They conform to no system. Each sentence is a living organism, as wayward and individual as other organisms in their undisciplined natural state.

In many cases the reader may wax impatient, and say with Coleridge⁸⁵: ‘It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture.’

But this is one of the instances in which Coleridge's criticism is decidedly peevish. Whatever might have been the absolute value of these tricks of speech, as a preliminary inquiry into the sources of literary style, an experiment in basing literary form upon the actual psychology of speech, they were far from worthless. The thoroughness and honesty of the experiment were sufficient to make it of value, merely as a scientific study; the fact that some of the Lyrical Ballads were never superseded in popular affection by the poet's greater and more elaborate efforts shows that it was also an artistic achievement—that the language was not the language of a class alone, but of the general heart of man.

3. NARRATIVE AND LYRICAL TECHNIQUE.

In attempting to make the language of the lower and middle classes the medium of poetry, Wordsworth rejected the devices usually employed in the eighteenth century to raise poetry above prose. Personification and periphrasis do not occur in the Lyrical Ballads. But, for the outworn arts of heroic poetry, he substituted the no less obvious arts of the popular ballad, interpreting and modifying them in the light of his own observations of rustic psychology. The two devices most frequently employed are the personal appeal to the reader—sometimes by the use of the second person, more often by an assertion of the writer's veracity, or a statement of the source of his information—and the use of repetition, sometimes in the form of a refrain.

In employing the first device, Wordsworth went far beyond his models, and thereby developed one of the most clumsy and ineffective mannerisms of his style—a mannerism which clung to him long after his experiments in rustic syntax had developed into a flexible and elaborate medium of thought, as well as feeling. The exchange of the impersonal tone of his poems hitherto for these garrulous intrusions of the speaker into the course of the story was a disadvantage rather than an advantage. However, these numerous tags are not unsuitable in the highly colloquial language of the ballads:

Two poor old dames, as I have known.(86)
There's no one knows, as I have said.(87)
His hunting feats have him bereft
Of his right eye, as you may see.(88)
Yet never had she, well or sick,
As every man who knew her says,
A pile beforehand, wood or stick.(89)

These and the like are obviously paralleled, not only in the habits of rustic story-tellers, but by the narrative devices of the ballads:

The sworde was scharpe and sore can byte,
I tell you in sertayne.(90)
I wis, if you the trouthe would know,
There was many a weeping eye.(91)

But it is in the use of the ballad-repetition that Wordsworth sometimes fails most signally, but more often achieves his most original artistic success. This device of style is eloquently defended in a note to “The Thorn” in the volume of 1800⁹²: ‘There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology; This is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by different words when the meaning is exactly the same. Words, a Poet's words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper. For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings. Now every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character. There are also various other reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion. And further, from a spirit of fondness, exultation, and gratitude, the mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear successfully to communicate its feelings.’

The strength and the weakness of this position are both illustrated in the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth did not accurately distinguish between the cases where language is really inadequate to express feeling—where a normal human mind is helpless under an abnormal emotion—and the cases in which the inadequacy is due only to the very elementary powers of sustained thought or expression in the persons whose psychological processes he chose to imitate. In this instance, he forgot to apply the principle that he himself found so fruitful—the principle that all figures of speech must be justified by passion. In such poems as “The Last of the Flock,” “The Mad Mother,” and “The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman,” there is the justifying passion; and the recurring refrains are felt to be as artistically effective as they are true to the feeling to be expressed. But too often the outward form exists without a sufficient emotional or artistic reason for it, as will be seen. But even where the repetition does not have its source in emotion, it is a legitimate mode of emphasis, provided that it supplements, instead of supplanting, the emphasis that a proper selection and subordination of details can give. Such an emphasis really exists in the Reliques. The theme of the story is generally so momentous, so melodramatic (being usually the danger of violent death to some person or group of persons), and the outstanding circumstances so important, that the poet must necessarily omit minor details. In the naïve and rapid narrative, the repetition gives a reality to details that the hurried feelings of the reader would neglect, or serves to emphasize some really important situation. But in the majority of Wordsworth's ballads the swiftness of movement is lacking, and the slow and thoughtful reading that he demands often makes the repetition unnecessary as a matter of narrative technique. An analysis of the various uses to which Wordsworth has put the ballad-repetition will make this clearer.

In the group of the philosophical poems, this device is almost the only feature that Wordsworth's thoughtful verse has in common with his naïve models. The original pattern of such stanzas as the following is obvious:

Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?(93)
Up! up! my friend and clear your looks,
Why all this toil and trouble?
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double.(94)

These at once recall the familiar structure of the ballads:

Here take her, Child of Elle, he sayd,
          And gave her lillye white hand;
Here take my dear and only child,
          And with her half my land.(95)

In the philosophical poems the repetition of a stanza with slight variation, so familiar in the ballads, is skilfully employed to round out the thought, and point the moral. In “Expostulation and Reply” the poem ends with a reference to the words with which it began:

Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
          Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
          And dream my time away.

In the “Tables Turned” the thought rather than the words is repeated:

Enough of science and of art;
          Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth and bring with you a heart
          That watches and receives.

In the other philosophical poems there is a similar repetition:

Edward will come with you, and pray
          Put on with speed your woodland dress,
And bring no book, for this one day
          We'll give to idleness,(96)

is echoed in the lines,

Then come, my sister! come, I pray,
          With speed put on your woodland dress,
And bring no book; for this one day
          We'll give to idleness.(97)

The words,

To her fair works did nature link
          The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev'd my heart to think
          What man has made of man,(98)

are recalled in the stanza,

If I these thoughts may not prevent,
          If such be of my creed the plan,
Have I not reason to lament
          What man has made of man?(99)

Here it will be seen that the closing of the poem with a recurrence to the thought with which it began, or which forms the centre of it, is an effective means of securing unity, and of emphasizing the theme.

In the narrative poems the repetition is more frequent, and possibly less justifiable. In “We are Seven” the repetition of the words which form the title, with various modifications—‘Seven in all,’ ‘Seven are we,’ ‘Yet you are seven,’ ‘Seven boys and girls are we,’ ‘O Master, we are seven,’ ‘Nay, we are seven’—is the repetition of the one essential thought in the poem, and represents the obstinate clinging of the child's mind to one idea; and hence it is effective. In “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” there is a similar effort to emphasize the theme, or rather the climax of the story by repetition:

That evermore his teeth they chatter,
Chatter, chatter, chatter, still.

In “The Anecdote for Fathers” this is hardly the case. Here, where the poet is speaking in his own person, and is not reiterating an important idea, the repetitious character of the narrative portion simply shows a difficulty in getting on—an unnecessary eddying of thought about something that should not hold it so long:

‘My little boy, which like you more,’
I said, and took him by the arm—
‘Our home by Kilve's delightful shore,
Or here at Liswyn farm?’
‘And tell me, had you rather be,’
I said, and held him by the arm,
‘At Kilve's smooth shore by the green sea,
Or here at Liswyn farm?’(100)

Here it is obvious that the second stanza really adds nothing to the first—as Wordsworth recognized after Coleridge had used this passage as an example of the tendency to eddy rather than to progress. In later editions he omitted the first stanza, to the great improvement of the poem.

But it is in the lyrical poems, where the repetition becomes a refrain, that Wordsworth's attempt to make literary artifice an accurate reflection of psychological processes is most successful. Like other poetical devices, the refrain has its origin in a characteristic of impassioned feeling. The mind under the influence of a great emotion is intensely preoccupied with a single idea, or group of associated ideas. Around these all other ideas tend to circle; in this every train of thought begins and ends. When a new and alien series of images is suggested, the mind follows it but a little way, and then finds some means of linking it with the single overwhelming feeling. Generally, as Wordsworth noticed, the idea is repeated again and again in the same or very similar words. But in many songs there is no effort whatever to trace the process by which the mind returns to the refrain. It is merely added every time at the end of a stanza or set number of verses, whether it has any real connection with them or not.

To make a natural, rather than an artificial, use of this device is the aim of Wordsworth in all the poems we have grouped as lyrics. Of these, “The Thorn” seems the least effective. This is partly due to the intrusion of the shadowy speaker, who is neither an old skipper nor the poet himself, but something between, and who, moreover, is not telling his own story. The lyrical element is thus partly dissipated before it pierces through the somewhat alien medium to the imagination of the reader. Nevertheless, in introducing the refrain,

Oh misery! Oh misery!
Oh woe to me! O misery!

Wordsworth has represented it as a natural result of the tendency of the adhesive mind of the old seaman to cling to the idea that has impressed him, and to repeat it in the same words—as well as an expression of the feeling of the poor woman.

In “The Last of the Flock” there is a double refrain which is much more skilfully used. The speaker naturally begins with the explanation,

Shame on me, Sir! this lusty lamb,
          He makes my tears to flow.
To-day I fetched him from the rock;
          He is the last of all my flock,

which suggests the history of the flock. When he comes to the account of his fifty comely sheep, the contrast between the memory of these and the one last lamb in his arms suddenly forces itself upon him, and he recurs to his first thought, but expresses the thought in different words:

This lusty lamb of all my store
Is all that is alive:

adding,

And now I care not if we die
And perish all of poverty.

This last reflection immediately suggests the rest of his story, and he begins again. He had to sell his flock one by one to buy his little children bread, he says. As he speaks, the woefulness of this takes possession of his mind; and, accordingly, every added group of details naturally ends in the reflection, ‘For me it was a woeful day,’ which becomes the refrain:

To see it melt like snow away,
For me it was a woeful day.
They dwindled one by one away;
For me it was a woeful day.

And from the elaboration of this thought of the dwindling, the mind is brought back to the original refrain, and the poem ends in the thought with which it began:

They dwindled, Sir, sad sight to see!
From ten to five, from five to three,
A lamb, a weather, and a ewe;
And then at last, from three to two;
And of my fifty, yesterday
I had but only one,
And here it lies upon my arm,
Alas! and I have none;
To-day I fetched it from the rock;
It is the last of all my flock.

In the “Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman,” there is a very lovely use of a double refrain. Each refrain seems to suggest the other, and, as in “The Last of the Flock,” both are united at the end; and the effect is still further increased by an echoing of the rhymes of the refrain through the rest of the poem:

Before I see another day,
Oh let my body die away!
Then here contented will I lie;
Alone I could not fear to die;

both of which are again suggested in the words:

For strong and without pain I lay,
My friends, when ye were gone away.
Too soon, my friends, ye went away,
For I had many things to say,
All stiff with ice the ashes lie;
And they are dead, and I will die,
For-ever left alone am I,
Then wherefore should I fear to die?

In the last lines the two refrains unite:

My poor forsaken child! if I
For once could have thee close to me,
With happy heart I then should die,
And my last thoughts would happy be.
I feel my body die away,
I shall not see another day.

Here certainly the eddying of thought is used with wonderful artistic effect, as subtle as it is beautiful and pathetic.

In “The Mad Mother” the repetition is still more delicate. It is used chiefly in a remarkable complex of rhymes, which repeat and echo each other. The result is a curious haunting cadence. Every rhyme falls on the ear like a refrain, though few are aware in what this refrain-like quality consists.

To trace further Wordsworth's use of the real language of men, and the psychological processes behind it, is perhaps unnecessary. A large book could be written on his use of repetition alone; but the discussion of each single example of every different usage would be more laborious than edifying. From the examples already cited it is evident that the language of the Lyrical Ballads is as much the result of conscious art as the language of Paradise Lost. It was a deliberate and thorough application of a theory which seemed strange enough to ‘indolent reviewers,’ but which has much in common with the theory at the basis of the more scientific study of language for the last century.¹⁰¹

Of course, in his experiment, Wordsworth made some artistic mistakes, and fell into several bad habits. A man of twenty-eight, ‘not much used to composition,’ is not likely to produce poetry uniformly excellent in workmanship. He is the less likely to do so when he has the misfortune to be born in a bad age, and must rediscover poetic principles and models for himself.

Among the evil results of the experiment was the unnecessary use of the various tags—‘why should I fear to say?’ etc.—which occasionally fill half a line with nothing at all; and the loss of that energetic forward movement so characteristic of his descriptive poems. The eddying repetitious narrative of the untrained speaker has its emotional uses; but it is not an ideal standard. The effect of a poem should result, as far as possible, from its inner structure. Where there is a continual necessity for external bolsters—repetitions and appeals to the reader—art in its highest sense does not exist. There is not a skilful adaptation of means to the attainment of a desired end.

Of this high impersonal art, where the means are concealed like the bony structure of a living organism, instead of shamelessly flaunted, Wordsworth was to give many examples. Indeed there are some examples of it in the Lyrical Ballads—in “The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman” and “The Mad Mother,” for instance; generally the art in this collection of poems is not so obvious as it seems. But over against the triumphs we may place such a failure in structure as the original “Simon Lee,” on which Wordsworth's own alterations were the best possible criticism.

In “Simon Lee” the poet is speaking in his own character, not that of a peasant or the garrulous old skipper in “The Thorn”; but he is nearly as helpless to mass details, and entirely to finish one thought before he proceeds to the next. The following is the order in which the details of Simon's appearance were first given:—ancient hunting feats—one eye left—a cheek like a cherry—loss of his master and friends—one eye left—disabled limbs—loss of kindred—his wife—disabled limbs—present attempts at agriculture—ancient hunting feats—his wife—his present attempts at agriculture—his disabled limbs. Here it is apparent that there is no control over the details, no attempt to group them at all; the mind of the poet circles round and round among them—advancing a little in the process, to be sure, but not in the fashion of a well disciplined intellect. It will also be seen that in the nature of the case there is nothing to produce his apparent helplessness—no difficulty in the simple facts, no passion to disorganize the mind. It was simply a bad habit into which his attempt to imitate the methods of untrained speakers had led him. This he himself later realized. After numerous and perplexing changes, the poem assumed its present form, in which ‘the traits and evidences of Simon's early vigour are concentred within stanzas I-III, while those of his sad decline are brought together in stanzas IV-VII, the contrast being marked by the phrase, “But oh, the heavy change!”’¹⁰²; and a reasonable order is substituted for the chaos of the first edition.

Similar changes were introduced into “The Thorn.” Of course in this poem there is more reason for the repetition, because the writer is speaking in the character of a talkative old seaman, whose mind is overwhelmed by a terrible, tragic story. But even here Wordsworth later saw that he had gone too far, and omitted several wholly unnecessary and repetitious stanzas, without altering the impression which he wished to convey. As they stand in the Oxford edition, “Simon Lee” and “The Thorn” are perhaps more really typical of Wordsworth's best art in 1798 than they were in the form which they first assumed. He has pruned the excrescences without destroying the essential character.

But a still better criticism of the style of the Lyrical Ballads is to be found in the second volume of poems added to the Lyrical Ballads in 1800—the ‘Other Poems’ mentioned in the title. In the “Preface” the phrase ‘language of conversation in the lower and middle classes of society,’ has become the ‘real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.’ And this more general application corresponds to a distinct change in the style. It has become the real language of men—of a typical man speaking—and not the language of a class. The peculiarities noted in the earlier poems have for the most part entirely disappeared. For the repetition, the uneducated syntax, the extremely bald vocabulary of the first ballads, there has been substituted the tone of cultivated conversation, easy, flexible, straight-forward, controlling the passion and the details, not controlled by them. The medium of communication between the poet and the reader is no longer the rustic, or a modern imitation of an ancient minstrel; it is a quiet, intelligent, sympathetic observer, who passes on what he has seen to an equally intelligent and sympathetic reader, in language unadorned, but perfectly adequate.

This conversational tone, with its self-control, and its unconstrained and progressive structure of the sentences and paragraphs, may be illustrated by endless comparisons. The extremes of the two styles may be seen in the first stanza of “The Thorn,” already quoted, as compared with the beginning of “Michael”:

If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
The pastoral Mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for beside that boisterous Brook
The mountains have all open'd out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation there is seen; but such
As journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.

Here, despite a few polysyllabic words, like tumultuous, habitation, etc., the vocabulary is not essentially changed; but how different is what Coleridge calls the ordonnance of the style—the various and expressive syntax! In the first stanza of “The Thorn” there are practically no conjunctions; no type of sentence is employed save the simplest independent clauses set side by side. Where subordination and relation are implied, they are not expressed, as in the lines,¹⁰³

                              it looks so old,
In truth you'd find it hard to say
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and gray,

where the prose expression would be: ‘It looks so old and gray that in truth you would find it hard to tell how it could ever have been young.’ The omission of the conjunction that, and the repetition of ‘it looks so old and gray,’ give the characteristic eddying movement to the verse, and a certain helplessness to the syntax. But in “Michael” there is no such difficulty. All the necessary connecting tissue of conjunctions and demonstratives is here; and there is a steady onward movement, with no repetition, no picking up of dropped stitches—so to speak. The poet still ‘talks’ to the reader; there is the tone, the manner, of spoken language in the use of the second person, and in such an expression as ‘But courage!’ etc.; but the speaker is no longer an excited rustic who finds his language slightly inadequate to the occasion, and cannot keep everything in his mind at once. He is the spectator ab extra, calmly though sympathetically holding all the details in his mind in their proper relation to each other, and setting them before the hearer steadily, and without haste.

A similar improvement in the character of the more lyrical style is to be discovered in the beautiful fragment, “The Danish Boy,” which employs a stanza almost exactly like that of “The Thorn,” and makes a similar attempt to give a romantic association to a particular spot by connecting it with a half visionary figure:

Between two sister moorland rills
There is a spot that seems to lie
Sacred to flowerets of the hills,
And sacred to the sky.
And in this smooth and open dell
There is a tempest-stricken tree;
A corner-stone by lightning cut,
The last stone of a cottage-hut;
And in this dell you see
A thing no storm can e'er destroy,
The shadow of a Danish Boy.(104)

But this does not mean that Wordsworth has abandoned his first attempt to make syntax follow more accurately the movement of thought. He has merely learned that the effect of extemporaneous speech may be conveyed without an absolutely literal imitation of all its repetitions and ineptitudes. In “The Brothers,” for instance, the characteristics of the syntax of the Lyrical Ballads are retained, with further improvements and variations; but at the same time there is greater skill in the arrangement of details, and a real distinction of style.

The opening is a model of exposition:

These Tourists, Heaven preserve us! needs must live
A profitable life: some glance along
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
And they were butterflies to wheel about
Long as their summer lasted; some, as wise
Upon the forehead of a jutting crag
Sit perch'd with book and pencil on their knee,
And look and scribble, scribble on and look,
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.
But, for that moping son of Idleness
Why can he tarry yonder?

Here the method of procedure from the general to the particular could hardly be bettered. There is the statement concerning the character of tourists in general; the division of the genus into species; and then the reference to the particular individual who stands by himself. The sentence-structure, too, is varied and flexible; yet the tone of conversation is maintained throughout, and the vocabulary is strictly the vocabulary of ordinary speech. Of course, when the old vicar begins to tell his story, he falls into the peculiarities of speech which we are wont to call ungrammatical; but the progressive movement is not lost. The expressiveness of the deviations from standard syntax, marked by italics, will be noticed at once, as well as a fine antique quality in the language, which reminded Lamb of Shakespeare:

                                                  That's Walter Ewbank.
He had as white a head and fresh a cheek
As ever were produc'd by youth and age
Engendering in the blood of hale fourscore.
For five long generations had the heart
Of Walter's forefathers o'erflow'd the bounds
Of their inheritance, that single cottage,
You see it yonder, and those few green fields.
They toil'd and wrought, and still, from sire to son,
Each struggled, and each yielded as before
A little—yet a little—and old Walter,
They left to him the family heart, and land
With other burthens than the crop it bore.
Year after year the old man still preserv'd
A chearful mind, and buffeted with bond,
Interest and mortgages; at last he sank,
And went into his grave before his time.
Poor Walter! whether it was care that spurr'd him
God only knows, but to the very last,
He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale.(105)

As “The Brothers” is the best example of the real language of men attempted in the volume of 1798, so “Ruth” is a happier example of the use of the mannerisms adopted from the ballads than anything in the first edition. Here all the old tricks reappear; but they have become minor elements in a far more elaborate and finished technique.

For the original simplicity of syntax there is substituted a structure more complex and sustained. Now and then, to be sure, Wordsworth retains the method of simply setting more or less naturally related facts side by side, in the form of independent statements, without an attempt to show their natural relations, as in the stanza,

There came a Youth from Georgia's shore,
A military Casque he wore
With splendid feathers drest;
He brought them from the Cherokees;
The feathers nodded in the breeze
And made a gallant crest,(106)

where the relations of thought to thought might be expressed in somewhat this fashion—‘There came a youth from Georgia's shore, who wore a military casque dressed with splendid feathers, which he brought from the Cherokees. These feathers nodded in the breeze.’ But for the most part there is sufficient connecting tissue, and the light and shade and emphasis are furnished by proper subordination. When this is lacking, the reader, perceiving how well the poet knows his trade, is inclined to think that there is some reason for the omission—a peculiar emphasis to be gained thereby. But for one stanza of this type there are a dozen in which all the resources of elaborate and varied syntax seem to be at the writer's command. The greater part of “Ruth” is a model of perspicuous sentence-structure. Moreover, the various narrative-tags are no longer obtrusive, though they still occur:

But, as you have before been told
This Stripling, sportive, gay and bold,
Had roamed about with vagrant bands
Of Indians in the west.(107)
Even so they did; and I may say
That to sweet Ruth that happy day
Was more than human life.(108)
A Barn her winter bed supplies,
But till the warmth of summer skies
And summer days is gone,
(And in this tale we all agree)
She sleeps beneath the greenwood tree,
And other home hath none.(109)

They are merged in the general excellence of the style, and seem a natural part of it.

Again, there is something peculiarly effective in the occasional use of the ballad-repetition,

Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned,
A young and happy child,(110)

and the naïve, ballad-like, ending is very beautiful:

Farewel! and when thy days are told
Ill-fated Ruth! in hallowed mould
Thy corpse shall buried be,
For thee a funeral bell shall ring,
And all the congregation sing
A Christian psalm for thee.(111)

Hence, as early as 1800, Wordsworth was already outgrowing the “Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads” and with it the experimental period of his career. Some traces of the original theory of course remain, both in the hard bits of literal, matter-of-fact statement in poems like “Alice Fell,” and in his occasional defense of so-called ‘prosaic’ language. Certainly the original theory continued to interest him until about 1805, the last reprinting of the Lyrical Ballads of 1800 with their “Preface.” But for the real source of his poetic diction henceforth we must look mainly to his reading. In the volumes of 1807 the influence of Spenser and of the Elizabethan library furnished by Lamb is everywhere evident, especially the pure and quiet cadences of the later Elizabethans, Daniel, Drayton, and Beaumont. The sonnets, which form so numerous and so beautiful a part of his poetry after 1800, were written under the immediate influence of Milton. The noble and unique language of the Prelude is created out of the apparently unpromising terminology of the philosophers, Hartley and Darwin. No doubt the eloquent discourses of Coleridge served as an intermediary step in this alchemic transmutation. The poetry of 1814-1816 was influenced by the re-reading of Virgil and other Latin authors. There is a pensive Virgilian graciousness of language in some of his too much neglected later poems, such as the “Egyptian Maid.” The language of the later poems also reflects the stiff, but often deeply pathetic, Latin of early ecclesiastical literature. From sources like these, not from the speech of the dalesmen, was the greater part of Wordsworth's phraseology ultimately derived.

But, after all, it was the theory suggested in the “Advertisement” which taught Wordsworth to make this use of books. Through his apparent repudiation of the language of books he entered into his literary inheritance. His theory of poetic diction served as a test by which he might seek out the genuine metal of poetry, and appropriate it to himself. He had already shown a disposition to test and appropriate in his use of borrowed phrases in the Descriptive Sketches. But the touchstone, while good as far as it went, had not been sufficient. He had learned to judge natural imagery used in poetry in accordance with his own experience, and to include in his own work the expressions which satisfied him. But he had not learned to judge of language and the psychology of human expression. He merely took what pleased him, and what pleased him was the strange, the original, the fantastic. He had no social consciousness—no knowledge of the way in which others might react to the words that he used. The theory of the Lyrical Ballads awakened in him this social consciousness. He wished to learn how living men spoke, how they had always spoken. He learned to test his language in accordance both with general usage and with actual psychology. This gave him a control over the resources of his own tongue such as only the scholarly poets may have. After 1798 it is almost impossible to catch Wordsworth in a questionable use of a word or a slip of grammar. His vocabulary has a purity and precision which neither Milton nor Tennyson, the self-conscious artists in language, can equal—however they may surpass him in splendor and sonorous music. His sentence-structure is remarkable alike for its peculiar flexibility and for its strict observance of grammar and idiom. He continues to read more and more in the field of English literature, but with discrimination; at any moment he is ready to give an account of the literary faith that is in him. He had rediscovered the principles of English poetry, and in so doing had discovered himself. It is in this discovery, not in any experimental imitation of the speech of Tom, Dick, or Harry, that the true significance of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction lies.

Notes

1. See note on Tintern Abbey in the Lyrical Ballads, 1802-1805, reprinted by Hutchinson in the Oxford edition, p. 901.

2. Preface, 1800, p. xxxv.

3. Preface, 1800, p. xvii.

4. Occurs in Chaucer's poetry as crul, crulle, meaning curly.

5. We are Seven 5-8.

6. Lyrical Ballads, ed. Hutchinson, p. 240.

7. The Thorn 67-70.

8. The Tables Turned 25-28.

9. The earliest occurrence of this word noted in the N. E. D. [New English Dictionary] is in Topsell, Serpents 621 (1607).

10. The earliest occurrence of this word noted in the N. E. D. is in Palladadius On Husbandry 1. 1027 (c. 1440).

11. The earliest occurrence of the word in this sense noted in the N. E. D. is in Wyatt, Death of the Countess Pembroke 421-422 (1542).

12. Of the words in the Concordance to the poems of Wordsworth, I estimate that about 60 per cent occur, in some form, in the poetry of Chaucer; about 68 per cent in the poetry of Milton; about 80 per cent in the poetry of Spenser; and 90 per cent in the poetry of Shakespeare.

13. Peter Bell 199-200. Reprinted from the edition of 1819 in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Hutchinson, pp. 137 ff.

14. The Tinker 37.

15. The Idiot Boy 107.

16. Ibid. 114.

17. Ibid. 258.

18. The Tinker 12.

19. Goody Blake and Harry Gill 12.

20. The Idiot Boy 299-300.

21. The Thorn 131-132. Altered in 1815 to:

    A fire was kindled in her breast,
    Which might not burn itself to rest.

22. Reprinted in A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge Manuscripts in the Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman, pp. 67-68; cf. Knight, Life of Wordsworth 1. 310.

23. The Tinker 1-15.

24. Bang, fiddle-faddle, tinder, etc., were omitted in revision, and never employed again.

25. Burr, curr, hob-nob, hurly-burly, flurry (in the phrase in a flurry), etc., are employed only in the Lyrical Ballads. Bowzes, batter, bumming, etc., occur only in the unpublished poem, The Tinker.

26. None of the expressions here mentioned occurs in Wordsworth's poetry outside of the Lyrical Ballads.

27. D. S. Quarto 643.

28. Ibid. 650.

29. Immortality 196.

30. Ibid. 170-171.

31. Lady! the songs of Spring were in the grove 12-14.

32. Cf. Memoirs 1. 129.

33. Of Simon Lee Wordsworth says: ‘The expression when the hounds were out, “I dearly love their voices” [Simon Lee 48] was word for word’ from the lips of the old man who served as the model for the superannuated huntsman [Memoirs 1. 111]. The beautiful lines in The Solitary Reaper,

    The music in my heart I bore
    Long after it was heard no more,

    are almost word for word from the journal of Wordsworth's Quaker friend, Thomas Wilkinson. See the passage from the journal, quoted in Harper's William Wordsworth 2. 66.

34. B. L. [Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross] 2. 43-44.

35. There is a good specimen of rustic syntax in the letter from an old servant quoted in Southey's Lives of Uneducated Poets, p. 2, in the passage: ‘The last of my humble attempts … subscribe myself.’

36. B. L. 2. 109.

37. Historical Outlines of English Syntax, p. 9.

38. Chevy Chase 85.

39. The Battle of Otterbourne 5-6.

40. Sir Cauline, Part II 17.

41. Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne 57.

42. There are thirty-two examples of it in the thirteen Lyrical Ballads.

43. Expostulation and Reply 17.

44. Lines Written in Early Spring 15-16.

45. We Are Seven 34.

46. The Idiot Boy 313.

47. The Last of the Flock 17-18.

48. The Idiot Boy 3-4.

49. Ibid. 175.

50. The Mad Mother 47-48.

51. Ibid. 87-88.

52. Simon Lee 35.

53. The Idiot Boy 4-5.

54. Ibid. 187.

55. The Thorn 200.

56. Goody Blake and Harry Gill 25-27.

57. The Thorn 190-191.

58. The Idiot Boy 82-84.

59. Historical Outlines of English Syntax, p. 40.

60. Cf. the parody of Peter Bell by John Hamilton Reynolds which appeared in 1819, just before Wordsworth's own poem of that name. (It is one of the few parodies of Wordsworth which really reproduce the poet's mannerisms of syntax. The oft quoted parody by Horace Smith in Rejected Addresses, for instance, has not caught the poet's style at all.)

    Now I arise, and away we go,
    My little hobby-horse and me.

61. The Thorn 5-6.

62. Ibid. 142-143.

63. Simon Lee 55-56.

64. The Idiot Boy 245-246. Cf. Reynold's Peter Bell:

    And gathered leeches are to him,
    To Peter Bell, like gathered flowers.

65. The Mad Mother 33.

66. The Thorn 17.

67. The Idiot Boy 299-300.

68. The Idiot Boy 250-251.

69. Ibid. 16.

70. The Mad Mother 1-5.

71. We Are Seven 5-6.

72. Anecdote for Fathers 1-4. Cf. the use of an independent clause where we should expect a relative clause in the ballads, for example, Edom O'Gordon 85-86:

    Then bespake his dochter dear,
    She was baith jimp and sma.

73. The Thorn 1-11.

74. Anecdote for Fathers 49-52.

75. The Thorn 115-118. Cf. Chevy Chase 89-90:

    ‘Then bespake a squyar off Northombarlonde,
    Ric. Wytharynton was his nam,’ etc.

76. The Idiot Boy 24-26.

77. Ibid. 88-89.

78. The Mad Mother 9-10.

79. The Idiot Boy 99-101.

80. Goody Blake and Harry Gill 41-42.

81. The Idiot Boy 124-126.

82. Goody Blake and Harry Gill 101; Anecdote for Fathers 12, 57; The Thorn 5. 4; The Idiot Boy 96; etc. Such repetition is characteristic of the ballads; cf. Sir Aldingar 147: ‘Then woeful, woeful was her hart.’

83. The Mad Mother 27-28; The Idiot Boy 28-29; The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman 36, etc.

84. Cf. The Idiot Boy 254: ‘Tis silence all on every side.’

85. B. L. 2. 43.

86. Goody Blake and Harry Gill 34.

87. The Thorn 162.

88. Simon Lee 26.

89. Goody Blake and Harry Gill 53-55.

90. The Battle of Otterbourne 109-110.

91. The Rising in the North 51-52.

92. Reprinted in the Oxford edition, pp. 899-900.

93. Expostulation and Reply 1-4.

94. The Tables Turned 1-4.

95. The Child of Elle 189-192.

96. To my Sister 13-16.

97. Ibid. 37-40.

98. Lines Written in Early Spring 5-8.

99. Lines Written in Early Spring 21-24.

100. Anecdote for Fathers 29-36.

101. Cf. Kellner, Historical Outlines of English Syntax, p. 10. ‘In the study of English syntax, the vulgar talk cannot be overlooked, nay—but for the difficulty of getting trustworthy materials—we ought, in discussing the evolution of syntax, to start from the rustic talk, just as a botanist, in dealing with the evolution of the strawberry, will not take the artificial fruit, but the wild strawberry of the wood as the starting-point of his study.’

102. Lyrical Ballads, ed. Hutchinson, note on Simon Lee.

103. The Thorn 1-4.

104. The Danish Boy 1-11.

105. The Brothers 200-219.

106. Ruth 12-18. (The references are to the first version of Ruth, in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800.)

107. Ruth 109-110, 113-14.

108. Ibid. 100-102.

109. Ibid. 199-204.

110. Ibid. 221-222. Cf. The Child of Elle 169-170:

     Fair Emmeline sighed, fair Emmeline wept,
               And all did trembling stand.

111. Ibid. 223-228.

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