Poet William Wordsworth

by Donna Hatch

www.donnahatch.com

William Wordsworth was a poet whose life spanned the Georgian, Regency, and Victorian Eras. He and his beloved wife, Mary, and three children lived in Rydal Mount during much of his years as a poet. The Lake District where he made his home inspired many of his poems.

I was fortunate enough to visit Rydal Mount during a trip to England in June of 2017. Thought Wordsworth never owned this home, he rented it for many years. The home itself is lovely and beautifully furnished, but it was the gardens that really captured my attention. The Wordsworths loved gardening and created a lush, vibrant retreat in their four acre property, which William designed. He also designed the gardens for many of his friends and neighbors.

One garden is named "Dora's Field" which they gave to their only daughter. After her death at the early age of 43, William and Mary planted daffodils in the field to commemorate her life. The offspring of those bulbs survive today. In the spring, Dora's Field is filled with golden, cheerful daffodils.  Unfortunately, daffodils have a short blooming season and they were done by the time I visited.

One of my mother's favorite poems, which she taught me when I was child, is one of his.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, By William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth

The spinster sister of the immortal poet William Wordsworth was present at the creation of his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1799 Lyrical Ballads, which gave birth to the Romantic movement in English literature. She was also present throughout her famous brother's adult life. The two, among the five Wordsworth siblings orphaned and separated at an early age, would rejoin when Dorothy Wordsworth was 24 and William 25, and they would live under the same roof until William's death 55 years later.

Theirs was an extraordinarily loving relationship, and Dorothy's prose is credited with influencing her brother's poetry by the keen observations on nature she recorded in the journals William encouraged her to keep. An example from Dorothy's journal:
One leaf on the top of a tree—the sole remaining leaf—danced round and round like a rag blowing in the wind.

From her brother's poem Cristabel:

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

The first of her journals, The Alfoxden Journal 1798, takes up less than ten percent of The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by Helen Darbishire for Oxford University Press in 1958. Of more importance are The Grasmere Journals 1800-1803 because they record Dorothy Wordsworth's observations of the Lake District which her brother and Coleridge made famous.  Dorothy and William moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere the last month of the eighteenth century. Two years later William married Mary Huthcinsons who, along with her orphaned siblings, had been close to the Wordsworth orphans for many years. There is no jealousy on Dorothy's part toward the woman with whom she would share the brother she had lived alone with for the previous seven years.

Perhaps that is because as Mary busied herself with mothering the five children she bore William, Dorothy remained William's companion on their legendary walks throughout the Lake District.

These journals, which are copyrighted by the Dove Cottage Trust, give those of us reading them two centuries later a feel for the minutia of their everyday life: the ringing of distant sheep bells, haystacks in the fields, baking day. Surprisingly, to Dorothy, plodding through the frost of a cold January day was pleasant, but summer heat could send her to bed for days.

For the author of  English-set historicals, these journals are an invaluable source for descriptions of the English countryside—its plants, birds, and other creatures—in every season of the year. This little volume is a keeper.--Cheryl Bolen's newest release is Ex-Spinster by Christmas, a House of Haverstock novella.