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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) poet
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- Yet was Rob Roy as wise as brave;
Forgive me if the phrase be strong;—
A Poet worthy of Rob Roy
Must scorn a timid song.
- Burn all the statutes and their shelves:
They stir us up against our kind;
And worse, against ourselves.
- Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
- Character of the Happy Warrior (1806)
- Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
- In a letter to Lady Beaumont (1807)
- Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour
Have passed away; less happy than the one
That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love.
- Poems composed during a Tour in the Summer of 1833
- A cheerful life is what the Muses love, A soaring spirit is their prime delight.
- Action is transitory — a step, a blow—
The motion of a muscle— this way or that—
'Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed.
- The White Doe of Rylstone
- But hushed be every thought that springs
From out the bitterness of things.
- Behold, within the leafy shade, Those bright blue eggs together laid! On me the chance-discovered sight Gleamed like a vision of delight.
- Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
- Every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath.
- These Times strike Monied Worldlings
- From Stirling Castle we had seen The mazy Forth unravelled; Had trod the banks of Clyde and Tay, And with the Tweed had travelled; And when we came to Clovenford, Then said "my winsome marrow," "Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside, And see the braes of Yarrow."
- Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give,
And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live!
- Hail to thee, far above the rest In joy of voice and pinion! Thou, linnet! in thy green array, Presiding spirit here to-day, Dost lead the revels of the May; And this is thy dominion.
- 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.
- I wandered lonely as a cloud
- I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
- Lady of the Mere, Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.
- A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags
- Like an army defeated The snow hath retreated, And now doth fare ill On the top of the bare hill; The Ploughboy is whooping— anon— anon! There's joy in the mountains: There's life in the fountains; Small clouds are sailing, Blue sky prevailing; The rain is over and gone.
- Lives there a man whose sole delights
Are trivial pomp and city noise,
Hardening a heart that loathes or slights
What every natural heart enjoys?
- A soul so pitiably forlorn,
If such do on this earth abide,
May season apathy with scorn,
May turn indifference to pride;
And still be not unblest— compared
With him who grovels, self-debarred
From all that lies within the scope
Of holy faith and christian hope;
Or, shipwrecked, kindles on the coast
False fires, that others may be lost.
- Mightier far
Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway
Of magic potent over sun and star,
Is Love, though oft to agony distrest,
And though his favorite seat be feeble woman's breast.
- Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive.
- Much converse do I find in thee, Historian of my infancy! Float near me; do not yet depart! Dead times revive in thee: Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art! A solemn image to my heart.
- My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard.
- O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in everything.
- Shapes that come not at an earthly call, Will not depart when mortal voices bid.
- She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love.
- She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
- She hath smiles to earth unknown— Smiles that with motion of their own Do spread, and sink, and rise.
- cancelled lines originally in the second stanza of I met Louisa in the Shade
- Small service is true service while it lasts.
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
- To a Child. Written in her Album
- The feather, whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an Angel's wing.
- The gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.
- The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
- The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.
- There is
One great society alone on earth:
The noble living and the noble dead.
- There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale, Which to this day stands single, in the midst Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore.
- Of vast circumference and gloom profound, This solitary Tree! A living thing Produced too slowly ever to decay; Of form and aspect too magnificent To be destroyed.
- There's something in a flying horse, There's something in a huge balloon. But through the clouds I'll never float until I have a little Boat, shaped like the crescent-moon.
- True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.
- To ____ . Let other Bards of Angels sing
- Two voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains: each a mighty Voice. ** Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland
- The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
- The intellectual power, through words and things, Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!
- Excursion (bk. III)
- Variant: Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on, Through words and things, a dim and perilous way. - "Borderers", written 18 years before "Excursion"
- Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.
Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798
- Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur. —Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
-   Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: —feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten'd— that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
- O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
- And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.
And so I dare to hope
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first
I came among these hills;
- For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by,)
To me was all in all.— I cannot paint
What then I was...
- That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
-   Nor, perchance,
If I were not thus taught, Should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
- If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; And that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.
My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold Composed on March 26, 1802; the last three lines of this form the introductory lines of the long Ode: Intimations of Immortality begun the next day.
- My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807) Begun on March 27, 1802 and finished by 1806, possibly in early 1804. Wordsworth declared: "Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part."
- There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. (I)
- The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth. (II)
- Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel— I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While the Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning... (IV)
- Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream? (IV)
- Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy... (V)
- Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave (VIII)
- O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy! (IX)
- Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts today
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind. (X)
- And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (XI)
Attributed:
- A day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
- A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays, And confident to-morrows.
- A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
- A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all!
- All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
- As thou these ashes, little brook! will bear Into the Avon, Avon to the tide Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas, Into main ocean they, this deed accurst, An emblem yields to friends and enemies How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified By truth, shall spread throughout the world dispersed.
- Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer.
- Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ And to be young was very heaven. [re: French Revolution]
- Bright flowers, whose home is everywhere Bold in maternal nature's care And all the long year through the heir Of joy and sorrow, Methinks that there abides in thee Some concord with humanity, Given to no other flower I see The forest through. ** To the Daisy (third poem)
- But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.
- Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
- Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.
- Faith is a passionate intuition.
- Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good.
- For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
- Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely-calculated less or more.
- Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
- Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent.
- He sang of love, with quiet blending, Slow to begin, and never ending; Of serious faith, and inward glee; That was the song,— the song for me!
- Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.
- Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
- How blessings brighten as they take their flight.
- How commentators each dark passage shun, And hold their farthing candle to the sun.
- How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
- Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.
- I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
- I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.
- I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee.
- In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.
- In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind.
- Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?
- Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
- Life's cares are comforts; such by heaven design'd He that has none, must make them or be wretched.
- Lost in a gloom of uninspired research.
- Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
- Neither evil tongues, rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e'er prevail against us.
- Neither evil tongues, rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall ever prevail against us.
- No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.
- Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man.
- Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams— can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man.
- One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
- Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
- Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
- Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.
- She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love.
- She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.
- Small service is true service, while it lasts.
- Sweet Mercy! to the gates of Heaven This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven; The rueful conflict, the heart riven With vain endeavour, And memory of earth's bitter leaven Effaced forever. ** Thoughts Suggested on the Banks of the Nith
- That best portion of a man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
- That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.
- That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
- The child is the father of the man.
- The eye— it cannot choose but see;
we cannot bid the ear be still;
our bodies feel, where'er they be,
against or with our will.
- The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.
- The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.
- The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.
- The ocean is a mighty harmonist.
- The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benedictions.
- The wiser mind, mourns less for what age takes away, than what it leaves behind
- The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.
- These feeble and fastidious times.
- This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
- Thou unassuming common-place of Nature, with that homely face.
- Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
- Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil like bales unopen'd to the sun.
- We live by admiration, hope and love.
- We take no note of time But from its loss.
- What is pride? A whizzing rocket that would emulate a star.
- What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.
- Whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be.
- Wild is the music of autumnal winds
Amongst the faded woods.
- With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
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