SOURCE: Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. “The Ballad as Pastoral.” In The Art of the “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 149-87. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

One nearly forgotten episode in the history of Lyrical Ballads points up with wonderful irony the tensions of that unequal balance between poetry of the supernatural and poetry of common life: if Coleridge had been able to finish “Christabel” Wordsworth would never have written “Michael.” The episode sprawled over the spring, summer, and autumn of 1800, coming to a climax in the first week of October. By this date Wordsworth had mailed off in a series of letters to his printer all his copy for the second volume of 1800, together with the celebrated “Preface” to be printed with Volume I.¹ While waiting for Coleridge to furnish the rest of “Christabel,” Wordsworth commenced work on the critical essay he intended to print with Volume II. Meanwhile, Coleridge had come to the end of his inspiration, “stricken,” as he shortly put it, “with barrenness” by the disgust which he had suffered in completing his translation of Wallenstein. His own account of his failure is probably half candid, half fanciful. “I tried & tried,” he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood on 1 November (STCL [Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge], I, 643),

& nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from Skiddaw & Borrowdale was often as loud as wind need be—& many a walk in the clouds on the mountains did I take; but all would not do—till one day I dined out at the house of a neighbouring clergyman, & some how or other drank so much wine, that I found some effort & dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither Edge of Sobriety. The next day, my verse making faculties returned to me, and I proceeded successfully—till my poem grew so long & in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume as disproportionate both in size & merit, & as discordant in its character.

A little earlier Coleridge had reported to Poole that “Christabel” had “swelled into a Poem of 1400 lines” (STCL, I, 634), but since all that survives in any form is 677 lines, we are left to wonder how far the rest ever reached material substance in the forge of Coleridge's mind.

All we know is that on the evening of 4 October Coleridge abruptly left his house at Keswick and walked down to Grasmere, where he read to William and Dorothy the beginning of Part II of “Christabel.” After hearing the poem a second time the next morning with “increasing pleasure” (as Dorothy recorded in her journal), William composed a paragraph discussing “Christabel,” to be inserted toward the end of his“Preface”; that night Dorothy mailed it to the printer. But the very next day (6 October) the partners “Determined not to print ‘Christabel’ with the L. B.,” as Dorothy bleakly noted—perhaps because Wordsworth found the style “discordant” from his own (as he did tell Longman on 18 December; EY [The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787-1805], 309), but more probably because he recognized at last that the shaping spirit of his partner's imagination had expired under the weight of its afflictions.

To make up the loss of his long poem Coleridge evidently agreed to furnish some of the “Poems on the Naming of Places” (as Wordsworth revealed in another hasty letter to his printers, canceling the paragraph about “Christabel”; EY, 304-305)—an agreement, of course, that Coleridge never kept. But a good deal more verse was required to fill the projected volume, the printing of which had already begun. To meet this requirement Wordsworth (having now abandoned his critical essay) set to work on a long and important poem which may have been taking shape in his mind for some time. The poem is not given a title in Dorothy's journal, but it clearly had a connection with the half-ruined sheepfold, “built nearly in the form of a heart unequally divided,” which William and Dorothy went in search of and found during a walk up Greenhead Gill, 11 October. For the next two months William worked intermittently “at the sheep-fold” (both the location and the poem, we gather, for on one occasion they were “salving sheep” there), and finished the poem on 9 December.² By Christmas the 490-odd lines of “Michael” had been copied out (some by Coleridge) and mailed to Bristol (see EY, 308). Within five weeks of that date the second edition of Lyrical Ballads was on sale in the bookshops. “Michael: A Pastoral Poem” was the last piece in the collection, in the place originally reserved for “Christabel,” and was given the additional honor of a separate title page.

When he turned in earnest to the composing of “Michael,” Wordsworth probably had available scraps of two earlier treatments of this important subject. On the one hand there was the blank verse he had written for the Recluse or the poem on his own life, describing the heroic figure of an old shepherd in the Cumberland hills. Scrawled over the pages of Coleridge's 1796 Poems and over blank leaves in one of Dorothy's journals, these scraps tell mainly of one incident in the life of old Michael and his son—the search for a lost sheep. Some of them later found their way into “the Matron's Tale” in Book VIII of the 1805 Prelude; a few Wordsworth used for “Michael.” The other treatment of Michael and Luke, which lay unnoticed for a century and a half in one of the Dove Cottage notebooks (MS. 15), consisted of six roughly-drafted stanzas of a ballad, touching on Michael's misfortunes in a semi-jocular way. From these Wordsworth evidently drew the central image of the sheepfold (scarcely mentioned in the blank-verse lines), together with the central incident of the old man's tragic disappointment.

The intended order of the stanzas is difficult to fix, but this might have been the first one:

Two shepeherds we have the two wits of the dale
Renow'd for song satire epistle & tale
Rhymes pleasant to sing or to say
To this sheepfold they went & a doggrel strain
They carved on a stone in the wall to explain
The cause of old Michael's decay.

Next, apparently, a snatch of this doggerel strain, in the words of the shepherd-wits, written higher on the same leaf of the notebook:

Deep read in experience perhaps he is nice
On himself is so fond of bestowing advice

These lines are deleted, and a fresh start made:

Perhaps the old man is a provident elf
So fond of bestow[ing] advice on himself
And of puzzling at what may befall
So intent upon baking his bread without leaven
And of giving to earth the perfection of heaven
That he thinks and does nothing at all.

Then, evidently, the poet's voice is heard, commenting wryly (and here the draft is partly illegible):

The verses were trim & stood [small?] on their [feet?]
But all their suggestions & taunts to repeat
Twas absolute scandal no less.

Or alternatively,

And all that sly malice so bitter & Sweet
My pen it would sadly distress;
When I say that our maidens are larks in their glee
And fair as the moon hanging over the sea
The drift of those rhymes you will guess
Now from this day forward to tie up your [tongues?]
To teach you to make better use of your lungs
An hour will I spend to relate
What old Michael once told me while on a loose [stone]
One sweet summers morning depressd [and] alone
By the edge of his sheepfold he sate.

Here another version of this last stanza:

That pastoral ballad is sung far & near
So thoughtless a falsehood it greives me to hear
And therefore I now will relate
What old Michael once told [me] while on a loose stone
One sweet summers morning depressd & alone
By the side of his sheepfold he sat[e].

Then a snatch of Michael's own voice, counseling his son at the sheepfold:

Thy foreelders dwelt in the fear of their Go[d?]

The entire line is deleted in favor of:

Weve loved and weve cherished the fear of our [God?]
Should [thou] stir from the path which thy fath[ers trod?]

Finally a fresh start:

Then think of this sheepfold my Son let it be
Thy Anchor and watch tower a bond between thee
And all that is good in thy heart
You have heard of the end to which Archiba[ld came?]
Should thou stumble or faint from the path [illegible]
Should thou ever one tittle depart
He stopped & beginning to weep
He wept like an infant & [?]

And here the attempt breaks off.³

Readers who have learned to like “Michael”—readers who have, as Lionel Trilling once put it, passed the ultimate test of their tolerance for Wordsworth's poetry of understatement—may be dismayed by this crudely comic treatment of a tragic theme. Miss Helen Darbishire expressed shock and disbelief when she was shown these stanzas in 1959, scrawled into the notebook which contains the earliest version of “Christabel,” though she courteously helped to decipher them. Yet the mode they represent is common enough in Wordsworth's poetry from the years of Lyrical Ballads. One poem in the volume of 1800, “Rural Architecture,” though it treats a lighter subject, has the same meter and stanza form as the “ballad Michael.” Its central image is a heap of stones, stacked into the crude shape of a man by three playful schoolboys.

They built him of stones gather'd up as they lay,
They built him and christen'd him all in one day,
An Urchin both vigorous and hale;
And so without scruple they call'd him Ralph Jones.
Now Ralph is renown'd for the length of his bones;
The Magog of Legberthwaite dale.

The tone and diction of the poet's voice, when it enters, are identical with those of the “ballad ‘Michael’”:

—Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works
In Paris and London, 'mong Christians or Turks,
Spirits busy to do and undo:
At remembrance whereof my blood sometimes will flag …

Another similar poem, the only poem Wordsworth ever titled a “pastoral ballad,” treats one of the major themes of “Michael”—that is, what Wordsworth later called “the love of property, landed property.”⁴ (It was a theme he had touched in some earlier poems, among them the “Female Vagrant,” where the misfortunes started when the “old hereditary nook” was lost.) “Repentance: A Pastoral Ballad” (later dated 1804 by Wordsworth—PW [The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth], II, 476—but more likely written in 1802) tells the story of an old couple who gave up their land. Spoken entirely in the voice of the countryman's wife, the poem is a lament for the cruel loss. The subject should be moving, but its pathos is tempered by the same sort of bouncing meter and homely manner, particularly marked in the earlier versions of the poem,⁵ as that which distinguishes the “ballad ‘Michael.’”

O fools that we were—we had land that we sold
Snug fields that together contentedly lay,
They'd have done us more good than another man's gold
Could we but have been as contented as they.
When the fine Man came to us from London, said I
Let him come with his bags proudly grasp'd in his hand
But Thomas, be true to me, Thomas, we'll die
Before he shall go with an inch of the Land.

But this resolution dissolved; the land was sold, the son deprived of his birthright and condemned to the life of a wanderer; and the poem ends in despondency:

But we traiterously gave the best Friend that we had
For spiritless pelf—as we feel to our cost.
When my sick crazy Body had lain without sleep
What a comfort did sunrise bestow when I stood
And looked down on the fields & the kine & the sheep
From the top of the hill—'twas like youth in my blood.
Now I sit in the house and am dull as a snail
And oftentime hear the Church bell with a sigh
When I think to myself we've no land in the Vale
Save six feet of earth where our Fore-fathers lie.

This poem has sometimes been compared with “The Last of the Flock” (de Selincourt drew attention to the resemblances; PW, II, 476). The differences show something of what happened to the strain of sentimental pathos in 1800 and 1802. The old shepherd's distress in the poem of 1798 is revealed in the terrible eloquence of his own simple speech:

To wicked deeds I was inclined,
And wicked fancies cross'd my mind;
And every man I chanc'd to see,
I thought he knew some ill of me.
No peace, no comfort could I find,
No ease, within doors or without,
And crazily, and wearily,
I went my work about.

By contrast, the couple's distress in the poem of 1802 is muted, for all its homely realism, by a curious artifice of language and meter which gives the incident a fanciful flavor.

The same kind of loss is treated in another poem published in 1800, “The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale: A Character,”⁶ and again one can hear in some of its lines, spoken this time by an observer in a jaunty, colloquial voice, the distinctive tone and diction of the later ballads:

There's an old man in London, the prime of old men,
You may hunt for his match through ten thousand and ten,
Of prop or of staff, does he walk, does he run,
No more need has he than a flow'r of the sun.

Old Adam has lost his farm, run through the “ill-gotten pelf” that begging and borrowing brought him, then fled to London. The speaker's moral comment is pointed dramatically at his listener:

You lift up your eyes, “O the merciless Jew!”
But in truth he was never more cruel than you;
In him it was scarce e'en a business of art,
For this he did all in the ease of his heart.

The poem closes with scenes of the old man in Covent Garden, the Haymarket, and Smithfield, sustained, like poor Susan, by visions of the pastoral life he has left behind:

Where the apples are heap'd on the barrows in piles,
You see him stop short, he looks long, and he smiles;
He looks, and he smiles, and a Poet might spy
The image of fifty green fields in his eyes.

Other examples of what begins to look like a particular species of ballad come readily to mind. “The Two Thieves” in the 1800 volume opens with a characteristically exuberant address, though Wordsworth never ventured to print the original version (found in DC MS. 29):

Oh! now that the box-wood and graver were mine
Of the Poet who lives on the banks of the Tyne!
Who has plied his rude tools with more fortunate toil
Than Reynolds e'er brought to his canvas and oil.
Then, Books and Book-learning! I'd ring out your knell:
The Vicar should scarce know an A from an L;
And for hunger & thirst and such troublesome calls,
Every ale-house should then have a feast on its walls.

One thinks also of two other “pastorals” in the volume of 1800. “The Idle Shepherd-boys,” like the early blank-verse scraps of “Michael,” tells the story of a lost lamb, but in a joyous, half-serious tone. One stanza anticipates, or echoes, the “Intimations” ode:

A thousand Lambs are on the rocks,
All newly born! both earth and sky
Keep jubilee; and more than all,
Those Boys with their green Coronal.

The boys' gleeful games take up more of the poem than the unfortunate lamb, who has to be rescued by the poet himself, stepping providentially into the scene:

And gently did the Bard
Those idle Shepherd-boys upbraid,
And bade them better mind their trade.

“The Pet-Lamb,” also subtitled “A Pastoral,” is spoken by a young girl but overheard by the poet with such feeling that as he “retrac'd the ballad line by line” it seemed to him “that but one half of it was hers, and one half of it was mine.” If style alone were to be the criterion, one might add to this group poems like the galloping ballad “Written in Germany, On one of the coldest days of the Century,” or even the “Character,” probably of Coleridge, that Wordsworth wrote in the summer and autumn of 1800:

I marvel how Nature could ever find space
For the things and the nothings you see in his face
There's thought and no thought, and there's paleness and bloom,
And bustle and sluggishness pleasure & gloom.(7)

In later years an occasional poem appears to echo this style, as though Wordsworth were slow in abandoning a design that interested him. One notable example is the “Power of Music,” which Wordsworth said he wrote in 1806, and published in 1807. The scene of the street musician in London arousing in his listeners the same sort of transport as moved “old Adam” and “poor Susan” is presented in familiar anapests, and in a familiar tone:

That errand-bound 'Prentice was passing in haste—
What matter! he's caught—and his time runs to waste—
The News-man is stopped, though he stops on the fret;
And the half-breathless Lamp-lighter he's in the net!
The Porter sits down on the weight which he bore;
The lass with her barrow wheels hither her store;—
If a Thief could be here he might pilfer at ease;
She sees the Musician, 'tis all that she sees!
He stands, back'd by the Wall;—he abates not his din;
His hat gives him vigour, with boons dropping in,
From the Old and the Young, from the Poorest; and there!
The one-pennied Boy has his penny to spare.

The difficulties of defining a genre like the “pastoral ballad” while at the same time using the definition to identify members of the genre are sufficiently sobering. Precisely what the phrase meant to Wordsworth we cannot know. We are unsure, for instance, whether he would have applied it to his “ballad ‘Michael’” as a whole, or only to the shepherds' “doggrel strain” therein. There is a further difficulty here. As we begin to enumerate Wordsworth's ballad pieces in which subjects from common life that inspire pathos are treated in a semijocular manner, this genre seems to widen out in the poetry of 1797 to 1802 in such a way that one scarcely knows where to draw its limits. That is, a “pastoral ballad” comes to look very much like certain forms of a “lyrical ballad.”

But here, I think, is the point. The importance of this somewhat undistinguished species, the “pastoral ballad,” is not that it shows us Wordsworth writing in a semi-comic vein, or manipulating his subjects or his speaking voices in unusual ways—however interesting these matters are. Its importance is that it combines and brings into focus two eighteenth-century conventions that Wordsworth modified distinctively in his volumes of 1798 and 1800—the convention of the ballad and the convention of the pastoral. The second of these has had less attention than the first, in the background of Lyrical Ballads, and it needs to be set into perspective.

It is on the whole surprising that anyone could overlook the importance to Wordsworth of the pastoral mode. Only five poems in the 1800 volume are formally subtitled “Pastorals,” all of them containing shepherds, but Wordsworth's design was revealed by Coleridge in a letter to Southey in April 1800, at the beginning of work on the second edition: “Wordsworth publishes a second Volume of Lyrical Ballads, & Pastorals” (STCL, I, 585). By 1802 the title-page of the collection read Lyrical Ballads, With Pastoral And Other Poems. One of the important poems therein, “The Brothers,” which Wordsworth referred to at its inception as “The Pastoral of Bowman” (EY, 277) was “intended to be the concluding poem of a series of pastorals, the scene of which was laid among the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland” (Wordsworth's note of 1800). Although Wordsworth may have thought of “Michael” as the only other finished poem in this series, “The Old Cumberland Beggar: A Description” would have needed no more than a shift of focus—perhaps from the old man himself to the so-called domestic affections he inspired—or the addition of a moving accident to fit it for the series.

Most revealing of all is the way in which Wordsworth later ranked and analyzed the poetic genres. This is not to say that his efforts to divide his own poems into classes have been helpful; shifting and tentative to begin with, they appear to have multiplied confusion for even the most perceptive of later critics. Thus in recent generations we can find H. W. Garrod declaring that the Lyrical Ballads contains only one ballad; George Harper inventing such classifications as “The Story” and “The Short Reflective Poem”; and John Jones lumping together as “landscape poems” “The Brothers,” “Hart-leap Well,” and “Tintern Abbey”—poems which Wordsworth himself seemed to consider, respectively, a pastoral, a ballad, and an ode.⁸

There is better sense to be made of these efforts. The group of unpretentious lyrics in the 1807 volumes which Wordsworth called “Moods of my own Mind” appears to have represented for him both something like a pastoral form and something central to his poetic designs. Trifling and brief as they may seem, Wordsworth once asked whether these poems did not, “taken collectively, fix the attention upon a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the predominance of certain affections more or less permanent, more or less capable of salutary renewal in the mind of the being contemplating these objects? This is poetic, and essentially poetic, and why? because it is creative!”⁹ When Wordsworth laid out for Coleridge in May 1809 a tentative arrangement of his poems (MY [The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years], I, 334-336), he came up with eight classes, grouping the poems by subject. Most subjects were associated with certain emotional or intellectual faculties. Thus the first class included poems “relating to childhood, and such feelings as rise in the mind in after life in direct contemplation of that state.” “The Brothers” was to be placed in the second class, among poems relating to “the fraternal affections, to friendship, and to love,” and so on. “Michael” and “The Old Cumberland Beggar” were in the eighth class, poems relating to old age. Perhaps the most interesting class, one which Wordsworth confessed “would be numerous,” was the class of poems “relating to natural objects and their influence on the mind.” Some of the 1800 pastorals were to appear in this class, and it was to conclude with “Tintern Abbey.”

In the collected edition of 1815 most of the classes of 1809 were formally defined by faculties or activities of the mind: thus, “Poems Proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection,” “Poems of the Fancy,” “Poems of the Imagination,” and the like. “The Brothers” and “Michael” turned up among “Poems founded on the Affections,” where they were later joined by “Repentance: A Pastoral Ballad”; “Tintern Abbey” was among “Poems of the Imagination.” The class of poems “relating to natural objects” had disappeared and its contents were distributed.

At the same time, in the “Preface” to his 1815 volumes (PW, II, 431-444), Wordsworth enumerated the “moulds” into which the materials of poetry could be shaped by the various faculties of the poet. There were six of these moulds, representing a telescoping and reduction of the usual eighteenth-century catalogue of genres. The first three were conventional enough: the “Narrative” (to include the Epic), the “Dramatic” (“in which the poet does not appear at all in his own person”), and the “Lyrical”—“containing the Hymn, the Ode, the Elegy, the Song, and the Ballad.” The last three—the Idyllic, the Didactic, and the Satiric—were occasionally combined, Wordsworth said, into a composite form, and he offered as examples Young's “Night Thoughts” and Cowper's “Task.” In the fourth of these forms, the Idyllium, was apparently preserved the provisional class of 1809 that Wordsworth had called “poems relating to natural objects and their influence on the mind.” For Wordsworth defined the Idyllium as “descriptive chiefly either of the processes and appearances of external nature, as the Seasons of Thomson; or of characters, manners, and sentiments, as are Shenstone's Schoolmistress, The Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns, the Twa Dogs of the same Author; or of these in conjection with the appearances of Nature, as most of the pieces of Theocritus, the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton, Beattie's Minstrel, Goldsmith's Deserted Village” (PW, II, 433).

What is most striking about this definition is the way it echoes some of the central passages of the 1800 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in particular the paragraph in which Wordsworth had defended his choice of “low and rustic life” (Owen, 156-157). In that situation, Wordsworth had explained, our elementary feelings are best revealed “because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” In the long addition to the “Preface” of 1802 Wordsworth had again seemed to put the mode of the Idyllium close to the center of his poetic concerns. The poet, in his exalted task of binding together the “vast empire of human society,” of creating an art that would be “the first and last of all knowledge,” principally works with the common elements of man and the details of his ordinary life in the setting of the natural world. “He considers man and nature,” Wordsworth summed it up (Owen, 167), “as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature.”

In short, the program of Lyrical Ballads—if not the program Wordsworth seemed to recommend for all great poetry—is a program centered on the pastoral mode. It seems hardly too much to say that the Lyrical Ballads with their critical prefaces were simply Wordsworth's versions of pastoral, his contribution to the sustained eighteenth-century debate over the nature and the value of pastoral poetry.

If we think of pastoral as a form which embodies nostalgic memories of an imagined golden age, of the idealized purity and nobility of a time and a race uncorrupted by civilization, we can find equivalent memories in Wordsworth. His idealization of the common rural people of Cumberland and Westmorland—it caused some surprise among contemporaries who knew the peasantry better than he did—arose out of the deep impression made on his boyhood sensibilities by the solitary figures he met in his native hills. From the same origins, no doubt, arose the stately process of his conversion from Love of Nature to Love of Man. “Shepherds were the men who pleas'd me first,” he revealed in Book VIII of the Prelude (182-212), not shepherds from Arcadian pastoral tradition, nor even “such as Spenser fabled,” but men whose lives were “severe and unadorn'd,” filled with “danger and distress, / And suffering.” To enforce these distinctions, apparently, Wordsworth here inserted (in 1805) the “Matron's Tale” of an old shepherd and a strayed sheep and a lost boy. At the same time he made it clear that the shepherd he knew in his childhood could grow to more than human stature, could take on, if not archetypal, at least supernatural proportion and significance.

                                                            A rambling Schoolboy, thus
Have I beheld him, without knowing why
Have felt his presence in his own domain,
As of a Lord and Master; or a Power
Or Genius, under Nature, under God,
Presiding.

(VIII, 390-395)

This figure could show itself under various aspects of terror and magnificence. Sometimes to the watching boy he would seem to be “a giant, stalking through the fog, / His Sheep like Greenland Bears” (VIII, 401-402); sometimes simply a “Form,” “glorified / By the deep radiance of the setting sun”; sometimes an object, solitary,

                                                                                                              sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial Cross,
As it is stationed on some spiry Rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.

(VIII, 407-410)

In all these aspects the Shepherd represented man “ennobled,” “exalted,” “purified” by the imagination of the watching boy, and it was this image of man to which Wordsworth later turned when he wrote the studies of psychology and manners that make up the Lyrical Ballads.

We must, however, recognize that in shaping his version of pastoral Wordsworth decisively rejected the pastoral tradition that had prevailed through most Augustan writing. The shepherd, the man whose nature had aroused the youthful Wordsworth's “unconscious love and reverence,” whose form became “an index of delight / Of grace and honour, power and worthiness” (as Prelude VIII continues),

                                                            this Creature, spiritual almost
As those of Books; but more exalted far,
Far more of an imaginative form,
Was not a Corin of the groves, who lives
For his own fancies, or to dance by the hour
In coronal, with Phillis in the midst,
But, for the purposes of kind, a Man
With the most common; Husband, Father; learn'd,
Could teach, admonish, suffer'd with the rest
From vice and folly, wretchedness and fear.

(416-427)

If Wordsworth failed, as he confessed, to realize this truth in his childhood, he understood it by the time he began to write pastoral poetry—in time, that is, to align himself against the strong current of eighteenth-century opinion that held the pastoral to be a low and vulgar form in so far as it departed from the groves of Corin and moved toward common life. This current of opinion derived, loosely, from Rapin, who had argued that pastoral ought to imitate the actions of a shepherd in the Golden Age, in a state of innocence.¹⁰ In England the opinion drew authority from Pope, who had declared in a widely influential essay that the true business of pastoral consisted in “exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries.”¹¹

By 1750, Dr. Johnson had broadened the definition of pastoral by endorsing Virgil's: “a poem in which any action or passion is represented by its effects upon a country life.”¹² At the same time he sharply limited the pastoral by declaring its subjects to be inevitably uninteresting, too confined and special to carry wide appeal. His declaration perfectly summarizes the view that Wordsworth tried to counter in 1800 when he set out “to make the incidents of common life interesting.” Here is Johnson in Rambler no. 36:

Not only the images of rural life, but the occasions on which they can be properly produced, are few and general. The state of a man confined to the employments and pleasures of the country, is so little diversified, and exposed to so few of those accidents which produce perplexities, terrors and surprises, in more complicated transactions, that he can be shewn but seldom in such circumstances as attract curiosity.

Against this, set Wordsworth fifty years later (Owen, 156):

Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Elsewhere, in numerous scattered remarks, Johnson had made clear his contempt for modern writers of pastoral, even Milton. Like Pope, Johnson further cherished a strong preference for one of the two classical masters of pastoral. Theocritus, he complained,¹³ depicted “manners” that were “coarse and gross”; Virgil was “very evidently superior,” having “much more description, more sentiment, more of Nature and more of art.” Whether or not Wordsworth knew all these various opinions about pastoral, he probably knew those that Johnson articulated. It is worth remembering that he showed his awareness of Johnson by citing him in each of his major pieces of criticism (the 1800 “Preface,” the 1802 Appendix, the 1809 “Essays, upon Epitaphs,” the 1815 “Preface,” and the 1815 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface”). It is reasonable to suppose that when Wordsworth wrote to John Wilson in 1802 (EY, 352-358) about people who were “disgusted with the very mention of the words pastoral poetry, sheep or shepherds,” he was thinking of Johnson, who in the life of Shenstone had ridiculed Shenstone's “Pastoral Ballad”: “I cannot but regret that it is pastoral; an intelligent reader, acquainted with the scenes of real life, sickens at the mention of the crook, the pipe, the sheep, and the kids.”¹⁴

Wordsworth must, moreover, have known the arguments for or against Virgil and Theocritus as models for writers of pastoral to imitate, for these arguments ran through nearly all eighteenth-century writings on the pastoral. It is significant that from his own earliest observations on the pastoral Wordsworth praised Theocritus for a range of virtues. Writing to Coleridge in Germany, 27 February 1799, on the subject of character and “manners,” Wordsworth tried to explain why Bürger failed to satisfy him. His explanation touches several important matters.

When I had closed my last letter to you to which you have replied, I recollected that I had spoken inaccurately in citing Shenstone's schoolmistress as the character of an individual. I ought to have said of individuals representing classes. I do not so ardently desire character in poems like Burger's, as manners, not transitory manners reflecting the wearisome obliquities of city-life, but manners connected with the permanent objects of nature and partaking of the simplicity of those objects. Such pictures must interest when the original shall cease to exist. The reason will be immediately obvious if you consider yourself lying in a valley on the side of mount ætna reading one of Theocritus's Idylliums or on the plains of Attica with a comedy of Aristophanes on your hand. Of Theocritus and his spirit perhaps three fourths remain of Aristophanes a mutilated skeleton; at least I suppose so, for I never read his works but in a most villainous translation. But I may go further read Theocritus in Ayrshire or Merionethshire and you will find perpetual occasions to recollect what you see daily in Ayrshire or Merionethshire read Congreve Vanbrugh and Farquhar in London and though not a century is elapsed since they were alive and merry, you will meet with whole pages that are uninteresting and incomprehensible. Now I find no manners in Burger; in Burns you have manners everywhere, Tam Shanter I do not deem a character, I question whether there is any individual character in all Burns' writing except his own. But every where you have the presence of human life. The communications that proceed from Burns come to the mind with the life and charm of recognitions. But Burns also is energetic solemn and sublime in sentiment, and profound in feeling. His Ode to Despondency I can never read without the deepest agitation.

(EY, 255-256)

Shenstone, Theocritus, and Burns—three poets who were to be presented in 1815 as masters of the Idyllium—thus stand associated in 1799 as painters of humble manners. Wordsworth's earlier remarks about Shenstone are lost, but the tenor of them may be guessed from his later remark (in a letter of 15 January 1837) that Shenstone was one of the first poets who “fairly brought the muse into the Company of common life” (LY [The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years], II, 829). Of Wordsworth's veneration for Burns I have already spoken, and we will return to Burns in a moment. His veneration for Theocritus had deeper origins. “Child of the mountains, among Shepherds rear'd,” he wrote in the Prelude,

Even from my earliest school-day time, I lov'd
To dream of Sicily.

(X, 1007-1009)

And he went on to pay tribute to Theocritus by citing his seventh idyl, the story of “Divine Comates.” What Wordsworth seemed to admire in all three poets was their ability to reach the deepest, most typical patterns of feeling and behavior through the simple surfaces of life in rural settings, to find the universal in the local. In depicting realistically the “manners” of Sicilian goatherds of the third century b.c. Theocritus had touched the permanent elements of human nature, just as Burns had done in his homely lyrics about Scottish peasants, and as Wordsworth hoped to do by giving “pictures” of eighteenth-century shepherds in Cumberland and Westmorland.

The word “manners,” which figures in the 1799 letter to Coleridge, runs persistently through Wordsworth's critical vocabulary, from his talk of founding a monthly magazine in 1794, to be concerned principally with “Life and Manners” (EY, 125), to his notes on the Borderers in 1843 (PW, I, 342) distinguishing character from “manners,” which he felt at that date should have been more prominent in the play. Wordsworth defined the term rather slackly in 1830 as “designating customs, rules, ceremonies, minor incidents and details, costume, etc. … almost everything except natural appearances, that is not passion or character, or leading incident” (LY, I, 506-507). What is important is that “manners” was a conventional term in eighteenth-century writings on the pastoral, used more often than not in a fairly derogatory sense (great poetry imitated universal passions, pastoral poetry could only imitate local manners). For Wordsworth to tell his readers in the “Advertisement” of 1798 that they would like his poems in proportion as they knew and liked writers who excelled in “painting manners and passions,” as for him in the 1800 “Preface” to locate our “elementary feelings” in the “manners of rural life,” was to propose a tradition of pastoral which broke with that defined by the critical authorities of his century.

It is hard to say how well Wordsworth may have known the dissenting tradition of pastoral with which he was aligning himself. In its seventeenth-century origins the contest between the two traditions can be taken as roughly analogous to the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. Where Rapin had called for imitation both of Golden-Age shepherds and of classical models, Fontenelle had argued (in 1688) that the pastoral ought simply to reflect the psychological truth of rural life.¹⁵ In England, the boldest follower of Fontenelle was Ambrose Philips, who wrote of English rustics in an English landscape. We can assume that Wordsworth knew the controversies that had swirled about the pastorals of Philips and the rival pastorals of Pope, for in 1815 he alluded to them in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.” Pope's extraordinary reputation, Wordsworth charged, was gained not by poetic merit but by the arts by which he “bewitched” and “dazzled” the nation. But he was “himself blinded by his own success.” For “having wandered from humanity in his Eclogues with boyish inexperience, the praise, which these compositions obtained, tempted him into a belief that Nature was not to be trusted, at least in pastoral Poetry. To prove this by example, he put his friend Gay upon writing those Eclogues which their author intended to be burlesque.” Wordsworth showed pleasure in reporting Johnson's summary of these events, in his life of Gay. Despite their ludicrous and disgusting passages, these burlesques were taken seriously, “became popular, and were read with delight, as just representations of rural manners and occupations” (PW, II, 418-419).

Later in the century a growing number of poets and critics called for a kind of pastoral that offered accurate portrayals of common life. A fair example was Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric became a standard text and ought to have been known to Wordsworth. Blair cautioned that a wholly realistic showing of peasant life, such as Theocritus had offered, would be too low for poetry; pastoral should not shock the reader with anything painful or disgusting, like a shepherd's “loss of a favorite lamb.”¹⁶ At the same time, he proposed that the topics of conventional pastoral be enlarged, that the pastoral be used as a means of probing the heart. “Human nature and human passions, are much the same in every rank of life; and wherever these passions, operate on subjects that are within the rural sphere, there may be a proper subject for Pastoral.” Among the examples Blair found appropriate were some that Wordsworth clearly fancied: “the attachment of friends and of brothers,” “the unexpected successes or misfortunes of families,” and others. Blair reviewed the history of English pastoral and singled out Shenstone's “Pastoral Ballad” as a particularly “elegant” achievement. Along the way he reported that the program for pastoral poetry which he was outlining had been fully realized in some recent German poems, the Idyls of Salomon Gessner.

Gessner had been known in England for years, reviewed, translated, widely praised. Wordsworth and Coleridge must have talked about him at the start of their collaboration, for The Ancient Mariner echoes “Der Erste Schiffer” (a poem Coleridge later tried to put into blank verse, but gave up in “a double disgust, moral & poetical”),¹⁷ and “Cain” was patently based on “The Death of Abel.” Gessner's idyls were pastoral narratives or dialogues of a conventional sort (“Climena and Damon,” “Corydon and Menalcas,” and the like). Hardly one could be taken as set in modern life, but they did make use of sentiments and images drawn from nature and rural society. While some of their humanitarian strains may have touched Wordsworth, their larger importance is that they were modeled frankly on Theocritus, whose simplicity and truth Gessner praised without restraint.

How well Wordsworth knew Blair or Gessner has to remain conjectural. There is less doubt that he knew another writer whose remarks on the pastoral are scattered through some unimportant, little-read works. In a most interesting article published in 1957,¹⁸ A. A. Mendilow traced a number of ideas and expressions in Wordsworth's “Preface” of 1800 to Robert Heron, a champion of Burns who did a good deal of hack journalism, edited the “Seasons” of Thomson, and wrote a Journey Through the Western Counties of Scotland (1793), a book which Wordsworth's hunger for travel literature must have brought before his notice (Wordsworth alluded to the book in a footnote to Excursion, I, 341). Heron's memoir of Burns was published in two issues of the Monthly Magazine in 1797 (March and the June Supplement). In it he divided Burns's poems into two classes: “pastorals”—“in which rural imagery, and the manners and sentiments of rustics are chiefly described”—and “pieces upon common life and manners”—pieces, that is, “without any particular reference to the country.”¹⁹ Heron evidently found the pastorals more interesting. In Journey Through the Western Counties he had given special praise to “The Cotter's Saturday Night,” which he found a strong corrective to Gay's burlesque, The Shepherd's Week: it proved “that Pastoral Poetry need not to employ itself upon fictitious manners and modes of life, but may, with higher poetical advantages, paint the humble virtues, the simple pleasures, the inartificial manners of our peasantry, such as they actually exist.”²⁰

There were other important statements on the pastoral available to Wordsworth, and a reasonable case can be made for the influence upon him of one or another of them. It would be surprising if he did not know something of the essays by Joseph and Thomas Warton, or by Francis Fawkes, whose translations of Theocritus Wordsworth would have read in Robert Anderson's British Poets. But the only major influence we need to recognize is again the influence of Burns, who shows up here, as in other central traditions behind the Lyrical Ballads, as Wordsworth's principal British model.

Burns had presented his Kilmarnock edition of 1786—the volume from which Wordsworth had learned his first enthusiasm for Burns—as a volume of pastoral poetry, but not pastoral of the classical kind, as the opening of his little preface made clear:

The following trifles are not the production of the Poet, who, with all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies and idlenesses of upper life, looks down for a rural theme, with an eye to Theocritus or Virgil. To the author of this, these and other celebrated names their countrymen are, in their original languages, “A fountain shut up and a book sealed.” Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule, he sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language.²¹

Burns went on to quote Shenstone and drop a word of praise for his “divine Elegies.” But as though to identify the pastoral tradition in which he wished to take his place, Burns paid his handsomest tribute to the genius of two Scottish predecessors, Allan Ramsay, whose Gentle Shepherd and Ever Green were about the earliest eighteenth-century collections to adapt the pastoral to modern life, and Robert Fergusson, who furnished the model for “The Cotter's Saturday Night” and some other poems. Though he kept these masters “in his eye,” Burns said, “rather with a view to kindle at their flame than for servile imitation,” he drew unashamedly upon their themes, their meters, and their style. Later, in a little “Sketch” published in 1800 by his first editor under the title “Poem on Pastoral Poetry,”²² Burns singled Ramsay out from hundreds of “nameless wretches” who had tried and failed at the craft of “Shepherd-sang,” calling him the only modern poet who could match the genius of Theocritus:

Thou paints auld Nature to the nines,
In thy sweet Caledonian lines;
Nae gowden stream thro' myrtles twines
                    Where Philomel,
While nightly breezes sweep the vines,
                    Her griefs will tell!
In gowany glens thy burnie strays,
Where bonie lasses bleach their claes;
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes
                    Wi' hawthorns gray,
Where blackbirds join the shepherd's lays,
                    At close o' day.

Wordsworth's poetic tributes to Burns are in the same vein, praising Burns essentially as a poet of nature. One stanza of the poem written (or started) at Burns's graveside alludes to the kind of lyric that Wordsworth was imitating (probably “To a Mountain-Daisy”):

Fresh as the flower, whose modest worth
He sang, his genius “glinted” forth,
Rose like a star that touching earth,
                    For so it seems,
Doth glorify its humble birth
                    With matchless beams.

(PW, III, 65)

Lyrics of this sort would have helped Wordsworth to think of Burns as a nature poet, but the tradition of the Idyllium in which Wordsworth placed some of Burns's work embraced more than nature poetry. In one of the notes he dictated to Isabella Fenwick, Wordsworth talked about Burns as a nature poet but remarked how rarely the appearances of nature took on any prominence in Burns's poetry, despite his warm allusion to the privilege of describing “fair Nature's face.” The reason for this fact was perfectly intelligible to Wordsworth, who would have put a good deal of his own nature poetry into the same class. “Whether he [Burns] speaks of rivers, hills, and woods, it is not so much on account of the properties with which they are absolutely endowed, as relatively to local patriotic remembrances and associations, or as they are ministerial to personal feelings, especially those of love, whether happy or otherwise” (Grosart, III, 154). As the Idyllium described not only external nature but “characters, manners, and sentiments” or these “in conjunction with the appearances of nature,” so did Wordsworth celebrate nature not only for her own sake, as he might have done in “the hour of thoughtless youth,” but for the human passions “incorporated” with her “beautiful and permanent forms”—nature colored, as it were, by man's mortality.

Among the various strains of pastoral in Burns's poems, the elegiac strain was one of the most pervasive and distinctive, and it was this strain that Wordsworth followed as much as any other when he paid Burns the tribute of imitation. Wordsworth's elegiac voice can be heard in his earliest poems, mingled sometimes with the lugubrious Gothic mode from which he later freed himself, but it rises to extraordinary brilliance in some of the lyrics he wrote in Germany in 1799, about the time he was discussing Theocritus and Burns with Coleridge. Scattered elements of the Lucy poems have been turned up in scattered lyrics of Burns.

Again the silent wheels of time
          Their annual rounds have driv'n,(23)

must have reminded many readers of Lucy, “Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,” and other examples could be cited. More striking is Burns's homely variant of the pastoral elegy, commemorating “Captain” Matthew Henderson (Poems and Songs, I, 438-442). In “The Ruined Cottage” Wordsworth described one pattern of the elegy as he would have learned it from Moschus and Bion—not to speak of Milton:

The Poets, in their elegies and songs
Lamenting the departed, call the groves,
They call upon the hills and streams to mourn,
And senseless rocks.(24)

Burns's procession of mourners included these and the other conventional figures—flowers, the seasons, the sun and the moon.

Thee, Matthew, Nature's sel shall mourn,
                                                  By Wood and wild.

But he added some mourners that Sicily had never seen:

Mourn, ye wee songsters o' the wood;
Ye grouse that crap the heather bud;
Ye curlews, calling thro' a clud;
                                                            Ye whistling plover;
Mourn, sooty coots, and speckled teals;
Ye fisher herons, watching eels;
Ye duck and drake, wi' airy wheels
                                                            Circling the lake;
Ye bitterns, till the quagmire reels,
                                                            Rair for his sake!
Mourn, clamouring craiks at close o' day,
'Mang fields o' flowering claver gay;

and so on. When Wordsworth wrote his elegies for his own Matthew, the village schoolmaster, he picked up and extended this pattern, developing almost a parody of the classical procession, to include the whole range of rustic society:

Mourn, Shepherd, near thy old grey stone,
Thou Angler by the silent flood,
And mourn when thou art all alone
Thou woodman in the lonesome wood.
Mourn sick man sitting in the shade
When summer suns have warmed the earth,

and so on, through reapers, the mower, the milkmaid, little girls, “ruddy damsels past sixteen,” brothers, mothers, old women, and “sheep-curs, a mirth-loving corps!” (PW, IV, 453-454).

It is a pity that the Matthew elegies have aroused less interest and delight than the Lucy poems, for they are no less brilliant. The fault lies partly in the history of their publication, which has been disorderly. Three of them Wordsworth put into the volume of 1800, but some others he left in manuscript for years. He extracted and printed a fourth poem, revised and truncated, in 1842. The manuscript drafts from which he worked, containing two additional poems, were finally published by de Selincourt and Miss Darbishire in 1947 in the notes to PW, IV (451-455). But even then two stanzas were missed. Written into the notebook which contains the “ballad ‘Michael,’” used in Germany and later, these lines deserve to be set with the other members of the scattered group:

Carved, Matthew, with a master's skill
Thy name is on the hawthorn tree
'Twill live, & yet it seemed that still
I owed another [song deleted] verse to thee
I sate upon thy favorite stool
And this my last memorial song
We sang together in the school
I and thy little tuneful throng
These rhymes so homely in attire
With learned ears may ill agree
But chaunted by thy orphan quire
They made a touching melody
Thus did I sing, thy little brood
All followed me with voice and hand
Moved both by what they understood
And what they did not understand.

One other elegy in the volume of 1800 comes straight from Burns. To close his elegy on Matthew Henderson Burns had placed an “Epitaph” in ballad quatrains, addressed to the person who might happen by Matthew's grave. He had already used this form for the final poem in his Kilmarnock volume, “A Bard's Epitaph,” and Wordsworth used it for “The Poet's Epitaph,” the elegy he wrote in Germany, he said, while he was walking in cold so intense that “the people of the house used to say rather unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some night” (Grosart, III, 160). He seems to have celebrated his own imagined death at Goslar just as, according to Coleridge, he may have celebrated the imagined death of his sister in the Lucy poems. “The Poet's Epitaph,” published in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, has a satiric vigor that Wordsworth rarely achieved, owing to his resolve to avoid satire. Some of this vigor is visible elsewhere in Burns, if not in “A Bard's Epitaph,” but perhaps the most striking similarity between these epitaphs is in the image of the poet set forth in them. Burns's stanza,

Is there a Bard of rustic song,
Who, noteless, steals the crouds among
That weekly this area throng,
                                                                                O, pass not by!
But with a frater-feeling strong,
                                                                                Here, heave a sigh,(25)

is answered by Wordsworth a little discursively:

But who is He, with modest looks
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
The outward shews of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has view'd;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart …

Both images point up clearly the tradition of pastoral singer in which the poet desired to place himself.

The elegiac voice does not, of course, coincide perfectly with the pastoral voice, and a study of Wordsworth's place in the pastoral tradition ought to glance at other influences upon him besides the major influence of Burns. In later years Wordsworth identified from time to time various poems he had admired when he was learning his craft, and his editors have traced their influence and that of other poems he did not name. It is remarkable how many of these poems fall under Wordsworth's own definition of the Idyllium. Some of them were no more than what Wordsworth called “loco-descriptive” and what we sometimes call “topographical” or “landscape” poems, like “Lewesdon Hill” by William Crowe, or Dyer's “Grongar Hill.” Other poems he imitated were more loosely pastoral, like Beattie's “Minstrel,” the Seasons of Thomson, Collins's “Ode to Evening,” or Cowper's Task.

The influence of all these poems was largely felt on the verse Wordsworth wrote before 1797.²⁶ More important for Lyrical Ballads were, for example, the poems of John Langhorne, echoed repeatedly by Wordsworth from his earliest writings onward. In 1837 Wordsworth talked of Langhorne as “one of the poets who has not had justice done him” (HCR, II, 517), and it was Langhorne's “Country Justice” along with Shenstone's “Schoolmistress” that Wordsworth praised in the same year for having brought the muse down to the level of common life, “to which it comes nearer than Goldsmith, and upon which it looks with a tender and enlightened humanity—and with a charitable, (and being so) philosophical and poetical construction that is too rarely found in the works of Crabbe” (LY, II, 829). (Wordsworth never found it possible to praise Crabbe's pictures of rustic life.) “The Oak and the Broom, A Pastoral” in the 1800 volume, while it follows the major lines of Spenser's “February” eclogue in the Shepherd's Calendar, is a direct imitation of one or more of Langhorne's “Fables of Flora” (they appear in Anderson's British Poets, Vol. XI). The important difference is that Wordsworth prefaced his tale with a characteristic stanza to convert it from a classical, or neoclassical, or even Spenserian pastoral, into a Wordsworthian pastoral:

His simple truths did Andrew glean
Beside the babbling rills;
A careful student he had been
Among the woods and hills.
One winter's night when through the Trees
The wind was thundering, on his knees
His youngest born did Andrew hold:
And while the rest, a ruddy quire,
Were seated round their blazing fire,
This Tale the Shepherd told.

Other thematic and verbal parallels with Wordsworthian pastoral can be found in Anderson's British Poets, the volumes from which Wordsworth said he formed his first acquaintance with Chaucer, Daniel, Drayton, and other English classics.²⁷ One could move outward to minor English voices not in Anderson—poets like Edward Williams, whose Poems, Lyrical & Pastoral (1794) included “Lyrical Pastorals,” a “Pastoral Ballad,” “Pastoral Songs,” and simple “Pastorals” in profusion, or like Charlotte Smith, whom Wordsworth thought “a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered,” owing to her having written “with true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English Poets; for in point of time her earlier writings preceded, I believe, those of Cowper and Burns” (PW, IV, 403).

But instead of putting together a catalogue of these influences and others, it may be enough to remark simply how they help to set Wordsworth off once more from the ubiquitous and indefatigable Southey, whose experimental eclogues fall over the same years as Wordsworth's, frequently, as has been observed, treating the same subjects in roughly the same manner. For Southey's inspiration was German, not English. After William Taylor introduced him to the Idyls of Voss and Gessner, Southey resolved to write some English equivalents, “sketching features peculiar to England,” as he informed Taylor on 24 July 1798. “Like the Germans,” he added, “I would aim at something of domestic interest.”²⁸ In a prefatory note to the Eclogues he published in 1799, Southey declared the pastoral tradition to be a dull and undistinguished one, despite some illustrious names: “Pastoral writers, ‘more silly than their sheep’ have like their sheep gone on in the same track one after another.” He had found no pastorals to interest him save Gay's, before he became aware they were burlesques.

Since Southey knew no German in 1799, he had to depend on Taylor's translations of Voss and Gessner, and it is fair to suspect that his reading of Lyrical Ballads may have helped to teach him what a domestic tale could be. Wordsworth himself may have known of Gessner, but he evidently knew nothing of Voss until 1799, when Coleridge, who had translated parts of “Luise” some three years earlier (see his letter to John Thelwall, 17 December 1796; STCL, I, 283n) mentioned Voss in one of the letters from Germany.²⁹ The catalogues of homely pleasures in “Luise” may have left some mark on “Michael,” and there were doubtless other German strains in Wordsworth's pastorals, but the central lines of influence remained vigorously English—or at any rate, British.

Despite all the influences upon Wordsworth, important as they were, we should understand that in 1798 and 1800 and even later he was attempting to create a distinctive—we need not say original—kind of pastoral, suited to his own talents and answering his own purposes. There are, to be sure, difficulties in defining and limiting this pastoral. They arise not only from the looseness with which the pastoral (the idyl, the eclogue, the bucolic) was commonly defined in the eighteenth century, but from Wordsworth's strategy of founding his entire poetic revolution upon studies of “low and rustic life” (alternatively “common life” or “rural life”). As we have seen, some very different poems in the volume of 1800 carry the subtitle of Pastoral. It would not be fantastical to think, further, of poems in what we have learned to call the “descriptive-meditative” pattern as pastoral poems: the way in which the landscape delineated in the descriptive parts, at the opening and close of the poem, enters into the solution of a mental problem in the meditative part illustrates perfectly how the mind of man is fitted to the external world, and nature to the mind. “Tintern Abbey” opens (neatly) with an evocation of “these pastoral farms / Green to the very door,” and closes with “these steep woods and lofty cliffs / And this green pastoral landscape.”

At the other extreme, an interesting case might be made for the Excursion as a pastoral poem, an Idyllium. In one portion of the Recluse, “Home at Grasmere,” Wordsworth called for a pastoral poetry that improved upon classical tradition:

                                                                      is there not
An art, a music, and a strain of words
That shall be life, the acknowledged voice of life,
Shall speak of what is done among the fields,
Done truly there, or felt, of solid good
And real evil, yet be sweet withal,
More grateful, more harmonious than the breath,
The idle breath of softest pipe attuned
To pastoral fancies?

(PW, V, 327)

Without exerting too much ingenuity the Excursion could be looked upon as just this sort of pastoral. Wordsworth's earliest surviving statements about the Recluse, March 1798 (EY, 212), declared that his object was “to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society,” and he might have intended to echo the meaning of “little picture” for the Greek idyl. (“Michael” was intended “to give a picture of a man”; “The Brothers” and “Michael” together were “to draw a picture of the domestic affections.”) The Pedlar, later the Wanderer, had like Wordsworth himself drawn his understanding of human nature from rustic people—an experience that Wordsworth described in language which has been noticed to echo the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” (see PW, V, 412):

                                                                      much did he see of men,
Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings; chiefly those
Essential and eternal in the heart,
That, 'mid the simpler forms of rural life,
Exist more simple in their elements,
And speak a plainer language.

(Excursion, I, 341-347; PW, V, 20)

After the Excursion was published Wordsworth reminded Mrs. Clarkson (January 1815) that “my conversations almost all take place out of Doors, and all with grand objects of nature surrounding the speakers for the express purpose of their being alluded to in illustration of the subjects treated of” (MY, II, 191).

Other reasons for regarding the Excursion as a pastoral poem, a form of the Idyllium, could readily be devised, and some of them would seem persuasive. But argument of this sort is quasi-fanciful, and need not be sustained beyond the point where it helps us understand how hard it is to draw the limits of Wordsworth's pastoral mode, the mode of the Idyllium. From the slightest elegiac lyrics to the grandest philosophical blank verse, pastoral as Wordsworth defined it lies across an extraordinary range of his writings and incorporates the central doctrines of his poetic creed.³⁰

At the heart of the mode in 1800 was “Michael,” and to “Michael” we ought in the end to return. Wordsworth probably gave in the poem itself the cleanest and simplest definition of pastoral as he understood it in 1800, when he described the story as

                                                                                                                                            the first,
The earliest of those tales(31) that spake to me
Of Shepherds, dwellers in the vallies, men
Whom I already lov'd, not verily
For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Where was their occupation and abode.

He enlarged the definition in a letter he wrote within a few weeks after completing “Michael.” Presenting the volumes of 1800 to Charles James Fox (EY, 312-315), he singled out “Michael” and “The Brothers” as the poems which carried the social message he wished to implant in the minds of his readers. The word that rings through the letter like a refrain and distinguishes the class of poems to which “Michael” and “The Brothers” belong is the word “domestic.” The most calamitous social development of the age, Wordsworth feared, was “rapid decay of the domestic affections,” loosening of the “bonds of domestic feeling,” the slow disappearance of the spirit of “independent domestic life.” To help check this development Wordsworth attempted in “The Brothers” and “Michael” to portray “the domestic affections” as he knew they existed still among small landowners in the north of England. There is, he explained, a reason why the “domestic affections” in people of this sort will be particularly strong. “Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would otherwise be forgotten. It is a fountain fitted to the nature of social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was intended for, are daily drawn.” By exhibiting these domestic affections running strongly through simple rustic people Wordsworth hoped that his poems might achieve their psychological and social purpose—“that they may excite profitable sympathies in many kind and good hearts, and may in some small degree enlarge our feelings of reverence for our species, and our knowledge of human nature.” Fox's crisp reply must, incidentally, have been disheartening: “I am no great friend to blank verse for subjects which are to be treated of with simplicity” (Grosart, II, 205).

It is probably needless to remark that the ideal of pastoral poetry here delineated is a distinctively Wordsworthian ideal. If we needed any confirmation of this truth we could find it in Coleridge's (customary) dissent. It was not that Coleridge had a pastoral ideal of his own to advance against that of Wordsworth, but only that his interest ran to other matters. It is illuminating to set alongside Wordsworth's letter to Fox the parallel letter which Coleridge wrote (over Wordsworth's signature) to send to Bishop Wilberforce. Coleridge dictated this letter—which remained unpublished until 1956—to Dorothy and sent a copy of it to Poole, along with a copy of Wordsworth's letter to Fox.³² Inviting Poole to compare the two letters, Wordsworth's and his own, Coleridge promised that they contained “a good view of our notions & motives poetical & political.” We cannot be sure how much Coleridge may have been trying to speak with Wordsworth's voice—his letter restates some important ideas in the 1800 “Preface”—but Wordsworth's political motives do stand out in contrast to Coleridge's poetical concerns. Coleridge, moreover, moves to a level of discourse not often reached by his partner and touches revealingly on several of the issues that divided them.

The heart of his letter is an extended, rather diffuse account of the way poetic diction becomes corrupted. The account is founded on an equation: action is to the affections as language is to things.

I composed the accompanying poems under the persuasion, that all which is usually included under the name of action bears the same pro[por]tion (in respect of worth) to the affections, as a language to the thing sign[ified]. When the material forms or intellectual ideas which should be employed to [rep]resent the internal state of feeling, are made to claim attention for their own sake, then commences Lip-worship, or superstition, or disputatiousness, in religion; a passion for gaudy ornament & violent stimulants in morals; & in our literature bombast and vicious refinements, an aversion to the common conversational language of our Countrymen, with an extravagant preference given to Wit by some, and to outrageous incident by others …

Coleridge goes on to define the excellence of “our elder Poets” as a kind of directness and immediacy now lost in an age when readers take snobbish pride in comprehending a difficult style. The nearest equivalent passage in Wordsworth's critical writings is the early paragraphs of the 1802 “Appendix” on poetic diction, which may have been composed in response to some of Coleridge's ideas. To judge from the Appendix Coleridge did reasonably well in 1801 at expressing his partner's beliefs, though later in his letter he opened up disagreements. These poems, he went on (on Wordsworth's behalf), were not written for praise or profit. Had they been, he said, “I should have held out to myself other subjects than the affections which walk ‘in silence and in a veil’ and other rules of poetic diction than the determination to prefer passion to imagery, & (except when the contrary was chosen for dramatic purposes) to express what I meant to express with all possible regard to precision and propriety but with very little attention to what is called dignity.”

This rather awkward justification of Wordsworth's language must have strained Coleridge's powers of ventriloquism, and it is hard to see how it could have pleased Wordsworth much. While ruling out “personifications of abstract ideas,” Wordsworth had nowhere suggested that he preferred passion to imagery (unless Coleridge was perversely overreading the 1800 “Thorn” note); “dignity” was a word he had used in the 1798 “Advertisement” (not in the 1800 “Preface”) but in a neutral sense (expressing concern that readers of taste might find some of his expressions lacking in “dignity”).

But the relevant thing about Coleridge's letter is the absence of anything that matches the central theme of Wordsworth's letter, that is, a concern with the nature and function of pastoral. In the introduction to the sonnets included in his 1797 Poems Coleridge seemed to define something like the Idyllium: “those sonnets appear to me the most exquisite in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature.” But he did not write any poems that could be called pastorals, unless one thinks of two or three early experiments, or perhaps “The Brook,” which Wordsworth once said he thought was to have been “a rural Poem,” prefixed with a little epitaph from Burns.³³ Nor did Coleridge in his critical writing give this genre any special praise, or betray any special interest in it—except where he spoke of “Michael” and of “The Brothers,” “that model of English pastoral which I have never yet read with unclouded eye” (BL [Biographia Literaria], II, 62n). The portrayal of “manners” he always thought an unworthy aim: “the Poet who chooses transitory manners, ought to content himself with transitory Praise.”³⁴ More Augustan than Wordsworth in this respect, as in so many others, he seems to have looked upon the pastoral as a low or unimportant form. For a complex of reasons, most of them sufficiently clear, he appears never to have shared his partner's view that the poetic reform inaugurated in Lyrical Ballads was in some degree founded upon a reform of the pastoral mode—that a “lyrical ballad” was a “pastoral ballad” in many of its essential particulars.

For Wordsworth a form like the “pastoral ballad” must have seemed the ideal way of combining the two traditions of eighteenth-century poetry which he most desired to preserve and revitalize: the pastoral, with its truth to nature, and the ballad, with its authentic voice of passion and its truth to the elementary feelings of the human heart.³⁵ Both the pastoral of classical tradition and the ballad as Wordsworth developed it were dramatic forms. By combining them he was able to cut through the illusioned view of life that neo-classic decorum had required, to look steadily at his subject, to keep his reader “in the company of flesh and blood.” The combination must have looked for a time ideally suited to his major poetic aims: “to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them … in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.”³⁶

But only for a time. Rather ironically, the specific form which he filtered out in 1800 and called a “pastoral ballad”—the form, that is, in which “Michael” may originally have been cast—had a fairly narrow range and purpose, owing largely to its jocular qualities. Wordsworth would have known that in the earlier eighteenth-century controversies over the pastoral the “pastoral ballad” figured as a device of ridicule. In a Guardian essay, for instance (no. 40; 27 April 1713), Pope had pretended to admire a “Pastoral Ballad” (taken, he said, from an old manuscript, and “the most beautiful example of this kind” that he had ever found) written in grotesque and vulgar Somersetshire dialect. Swift wrote a pastoral ballad-dialogue in which he presented coarse rustics in order to satirize the genre.³⁷ Hence it is probably fitting that Wordsworth's own form of the pastoral ballad should have been in some sense a burlesque. The stanza of the “ballad ‘Michael’” he had used in “Ruth”; as Mary Moorman points out (I, 54), he would have found it in several poems of Elizabeth Carter, whom he professed to admire (see Grosart, III, 426-427). But he evidently added the anapestic meter in imitation of “Monk” Lewis, who had used it in some of his macabre tales.³⁸ By adapting the form to a homely and realistic purpose, carried out with jocular buoyancy, Wordsworth would have been accomplishing the sort of parody he had earlier managed by adapting the form of Bürger's ballads of terror to “The Idiot Boy.”

For all its narrowness, the “pastoral ballad” in the form of poems like the abortive “ballad ‘Michael’” represents an important transition in Wordsworth's development, falling midway between the very different lyrical styles of 1798 and 1802. Like poems in the volumes of 1807 it has some of the lyrical elegance, and perhaps the sentiment, that Wordsworth found in Ben Jonson, who strongly influenced the lyrical outburst of 1802. Like the poems of 1798 it is dramatic or semidramatic in form, and the characters whose voices we hear speak the language of common life, though rarely the raw colloquial language of passion heard in the earlier dramatic pieces. Overlying the voices and events of the “ballad ‘Michael’” and forming a distinct perspective, just as it does in “The Idiot Boy” and in Peter Bell, is the poet's own exuberant voice speaking an artificially flavored, jocular language in a rollicking meter.

But this transition passed swiftly. The jocular qualities of Wordsworth's ballad verse, which derive from Theocritus and Cowper and Burns, are important, and too commonly overlooked. But they are qualities that Wordsworth, for better or worse, outgrew as he moved toward the lyric styles of his later years, and the somber philosophical mode of the Prelude and the Excursion. As much as any other single event, the conversion of the anapestic “ballad ‘Michael’” into a muted blank-verse narrative signalizes Wordsworth's movement in 1800 away from his early experimental voices into the main region of his song.

Notes

1. The letters that survive are printed in EY, 285-312.

2. Dorothy recorded these events in her Journals, ed. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 42-54.

3. These stanzas, which are exceptionally difficult to decipher, are given in their revised form, with miswritings and some illegible parts omitted. Full transcripts showing all variants together with facing photographs are provided in BWS, pp. 72-75. In 1963 I read the stanzas aloud as part of a paper presented to the Modern Language Association of America, but no lines from them were published until 1967, when Mark Reed printed five in Chronology, p. 323, conjecturing that they spoke of Coleridge. It is possible that an early version of the first stanza to be written on the page was bound into the “ballad Michael” by a change in the opening couplet, “Deep read in experience perhaps he is nice / On himself is so fond of bestowing advice,” to include specific references to an old man: “Perhaps the old man is a provident elf / So fond of bestow[ing] advice on himself.” In April 1970 Robert Woof published most of the stanzas in “John Stoddart, ‘Michael’ and Lyrical Ballads,” Ariel, 1, 7-22, conjecturing that they represented the surviving scraps of a substantial ballad version of “Michael” entitled the “Sheepfold” which was “burnt” by Wordsworth on 9 November 1800 (see Dorothy's Journals, p. 50). The ensuing debate over these matters, joined by Mr. Woof, Mark Reed, and myself, was initiated by Jonathan Wordsworth, who discerned that at the stage when the poem referred to Coleridge “the two wits of the dale” must have been the two partners in Lyrical Ballads; see Ariel, 2 (April 1971), 66-79, and Ariel, 3 (April 1972), 70-83.

4. In a letter to Thomas Poole, 9 April 1801; EY, 322.

5. Found in DC MS. 80, from which the readings are taken. W. J. B. Owen has traced language in these early versions to conversation recorded in Dorothy's Journals for 24 November 1801 (pp. 61-62 in the Moorman edition); see his Wordsworth as Critic (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 80-82.

6. Published in the Morning Post, 21 July 1800, from which the readings are taken.

7. The version is an early one, from DC MS. 16. It may be worth observing that just ahead of the “ballad Michael” in DC MS. 15 a number of leaves have been torn out; writing that survives on the stubs shows that “Rural Architecture,” “The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale,” and “A Character” were among the poems once entered there (see Chronology, 322-324).

8. H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 148; George McLean Harper, Literary Appreciations (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1937), p. 159; John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), pp. 135, 138.

9. In a letter to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807; MY, I, 147.

10. His remarks were translated and prefaced to an edition of the Idylliums of Theocritus (Oxford, 1684). J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England 1684-1798 (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1952), gives an admirably full summary of these opinions. Leslie Broughton, The Theocritan Element in the Works of William Wordsworth (Halle: M. Niemeyer 1920), is also helpful.

11. “A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry” (1717), reprinted by E. Audra and Aubrey Williams in the Twickenham Edition of Pope, Vol. I: Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 23-33. The essay appeared in Robert Anderson's British Poets, 13 vols. (London, 1795), VIII, 11-13.

12. Rambler 37; see Vol. III of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, edited by W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss, (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 201. Johnson used this definition in his Dictionary.

13. As Boswell reported, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1934-1950), IV, 2.

14. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1905), III, 356.

15. I am again indebted to Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry.

16. Citations are from the 6th ed., 3 vols., of 1796; Lecture XXXIX, “Pastoral Poetry—Lyric Poetry,” is in Vol. III, pp. 107-136.

17. As he told Godwin, 26 March 1811; STCL, III, 313. On 13 July 1802 (STCL, II 809-811) Coleridge had written to Sotheby about his translation and spoken contemptuously of Gessner (it is the letter in which he talks of the “radical Difference” that had begun to appear between his ideas of poetry and those of Wordsworth, who had left only the day before).

18. A. A. Mendilow, “Robert Heron and Wordsworth's Critical Essays,” MLR, 52 (July 1957), 329-338.

19. Quotations are from the separate publication, A Memoir of the Life of the Late Robert Burns, issued in Edinburgh, 1797, p. 54.

20. Quoted by Mendilow, pp. 330-331.

21. Reprinted in Robert Burns, The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1968), III, 971-972.

22. See Burns, Poems and Songs, III, 1145.

23. “To Miss L—,” Poems and Songs, I, 319.

24. I quote from Jonathan Wordsworth's text, The Music of Humanity (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969), p. 35.

25. Poems and Songs, I, 247.

26. De Selincourt's notes to An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, PW, I, 318-329, offer a particularly rich catalogue of eighteenth-century influences.

27. See the Fenwick note to “Yarrow Visited,” PW, III, 450-451.

28. J. W. Robberds, Memoir of … William Taylor, 2 vols. (London, 1843), I, 213.

29. See Wordsworth's reply, 27 February 1799; EY, 255.

30. Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's Prelude (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), sees Wordsworth clearly as one of “the great pastoral poets” and Book VIII as the Prelude's pastoral book (“Sincere Pastoral,” pp. 243-252). He goes even further (p. 243) to suggest that “the whole of The Prelude, since it claims the primacy of Nature over Art and Society, can be viewed as a version of pastoral.”

31. They became “domestic tales” in the edition of 1827.

32. These matters are summarized, and Coleridge's letter is printed, by Griggs, STCL, II, 664-667.

33. In the Fenwick note to “The River Duddon”; PW, III, 503.

34. Coleridge's marginal note on Ben Jonson; Roberta F. Brinkley, Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1955), p. 641.

35. Wordsworth may have observed that Percy connected the two traditions in the Reliques. The connections are discussed by Keith Stewart, “The Ballad and the Genres in the Eighteenth Century,” ELH [Journal of English Literary History], 24 (June 1957), 120-137.

36. As the Preface read in 1802; Owen, 156n.

37. Harold Williams, ed., The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1958), III, 880-882.

38. The stanza form and meter are identical to those of Lewis's “The Stranger: A Norman Tale,” in Tales of Terror (Kelso, 1799) and “Osric the Lion” in Tales of Wonder (1800). Southey may have served as a conductor. When he published his sentimental ballad “Mary” (in Poems, 2nd ed., London, 1797), he remarked that its form—a five-line stanza—was adopted from Lewis's “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine.”

Abbreviations

BL: Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907)

BNYPL: Bulletin of the New York Public Library

BWS: Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970)

Chronology: Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years: 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967)

DC MS.: Dove Cottage Manuscript

E in C: Essays in Criticism

EY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt; 2nd ed., rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1967)

Grosart: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols. (London, 1876)

HCR: Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938)

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

LY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1939)

MLN: Modern Language Notes

MLR: Modern Language Review

Moorman: Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography: I. The Early Years: 1770-1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1957);

II. The Later Years: 1803-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1965)

MY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed.:

Part I: 1806-1811, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1969)

Part II: 1812-1820, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1970)

N&Q: Notes and Queries

Owen: Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads 1798, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)

PBSA: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Prelude: Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt; 2nd ed., rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1959); the 1805 text is cited unless the 1850 text is specified

PW: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols., ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1940-1958), Vol. I, 1940, rev. 1952; Vol. II, 1944, rev. 1952; Vol. III, 1946; Vol. IV, 1947, rev. 1958; Vol. V, 1949

RES: Review of English Studies

SB: Studies in Bibliography

SP: Studies in Philology

STCL: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1956-1971)

STCNB: The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn: Vol. I: 1794-1804 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957); Vol. II: 1804-1808 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961)

STCPW: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1912)

TLS: London Times Literary Supplement

UTQ: The University of Toronto Quarterly