[In the following essay, Wu discusses Bowles's influence on two early sonnets by William Wordsworth.]

At some point after 1828,¹ William Wordsworth told Alexander Dyce that he had read William Lisle Bowles's Fourteen Sonnets on publication; his recollection is quite specific:

When Bowles's Sonnets first appeared,—a thin 4to pamphlet, entitled Fourteen Sonnets,—I bought them in a walk through London with my dear brother, who was afterwards drowned at sea.

(Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. Revd. Alexander Dyce (London, 1856), 261 n.)

Mary Moorman's dating of the walk through London as Christmas 1789,²supported by Mark Reed in his chronology,³is surely correct. It does not, however, accord with Wordsworth's statement, which refers to a purchase on or near the date of publication of Fourteen Sonnets—c. May, not December 1789. In fact, the surviving poetry from this period suggests that Wordsworth did not read the first edition of Bowles's sonnets at all. By December 1789 it would have been far easier to obtain the second edition, also a quarto pamphlet, which had been noticed in the Monthly Review in July. It was retitled Sonnets written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Tour (Bath, 1789), and presented only thirteen of the poems from the first edition, most of them revised, along with eight previously unpublished sonnets, making twenty-one in all.

There are two surviving Wordsworth sonnets from this period which show Bowles's influence: one is the unpublished ‘When slow from pensive twilight's latest gleams’. This poem, dated by Reed c. 1788-91—though probably written in 1790—appears in Wordsworth's hand in a juvenile notebook at the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, and reads as follows:

When slow from twilight's latest gleams
‘O'er the dark mountain top descends the ray’
That stains with crimson tinge the water grey
And still, I listen while the dells and streams
And vanish'd woods a lulling murmur make;
As Vesper first begins to twinkle bright
And on the dark hillside the cottage light,
With long reflexion streams across the lake.—
The lonely grey duck darkling on his way
Quaakes clamourous deep the measur'd strokes rebound
Of unseen oar parting with hollow sound
While the slow curfew shuts the eye of day—
Sooth'd by the stilly scene with many a sigh
Heav's the full heart nor knows for whom, nor why.

(Wordsworth Library, MS. 2, 82 recto)

The oar that parts of the waves in line 11 is a clear echo of Bowles's “On Landing at Ostend” (‘The orient beam illumes the parting oar’, line 1), a poem that appears only in the second edition of the Sonnets. Moreover, the phrase, ‘Soothed by the stilly scene’, proves that Wordsworth had read the revised version of Bowles's “Sonnet Written at Tinemouth, Northumberland”, as it had appeared in the second edition:

Soothed by the scene, even thus on sorrow's breast
A kindred stillness steals, and bids her rest,
Whilst sad airs stilly sigh along the deep …

(lines 10-12)

The word ‘stilly’ appears for the first time in Bowles' work in this revised version.

His influence can also be seen in another of Wordsworth's hitherto unpublished sonnets—this time one that was later revised to form ‘Remembrance of Collins’ and ‘Written on the Thames Near Richmond’ (both published in Lyrical Ballads, 1798). This poem, which Reed calls ‘Lines Written while Sailing in a Boat at Evening’ (Reed 22), survives in the Racedown notebook (Wordsworth Library, MS. 11), in a fragmentary draft made some time after its original composition:

How rich in front with twilights tinge impressed
Between the dim-brown forms impending high
Of shadowy forests slowly sweeping by
Glows the still wave while facing the red west
The silent boat her magic path pursues;
Nor heeds how dark the backward wave the while
Some dreaming loiterer with perfidious smile
Alluring onward such the fairy views
In [          ] colouring clad that smile before
The poet thoughtless of the following shades
Witness that son of grief who in these glades
Mourned his dead friend suspend the dashing oar
                                                                                          [                    ]
                                                                                          [                    ]

(Wordsworth Library, MS. 11, 33 recto)

The sonnet is inspired by Bowles's “Sonnet on the Ryne”, also written from the prow of a boat, and which appears only in the second edition of the Sonnets:

                              there on the woodland's side
The shadowy sunshine pours its streaming tide,
Whilst hope, inchanted with the scene so fair,
Would wish to linger many a summer's day,
Nor heeds how fast the prospect winds away.

(“On the Ryne” 10-14; my italics)

Bowles's influence is particularly evident in Wordsworth's use of the word ‘shadowy’ (line 3), and in his phrase, ‘Nor heeds how dark …’ (line 6).

The internal evidence of these poems, both of which were probably drafted in late 1789 or early 1790, strongly suggests that Wordsworth did not read the first edition of Bowles's Sonnets, but the second—which, with its revised and added contents, would have been more readily available at the time of purchase. Dyce may simply have misreported what was said but it seems more likely that the poet singled out Fourteen Sonnets to establish his claim to have been among Bowles's very first readers. The cumbersome title of the second edition was by then less well known, and would have made a much less impressive boast.

Notes

1. Dyce does not date Wordsworth's statement; Wordsworth and Dyce became acquainted in 1828.

2. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography; The Early Years (Oxford, 1957), 124-5.

3. Mark L. Reed, William Wordsworth: A Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) (hereafter Reed), 95.