WORDSWORTH AND THE POETRY OF EPITAPHS By the same author THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY: A CRITICAL STUDY OF WALTER SCOTT WALTER SCOTT: MODERN JUDGEMENTS (editor) JANE AUSTEN AND EDUCATION WORDSWORTH AND THE POETRY OF EPITAPHS D. D. Devlin To Edith © D. D. Devlin 1g8o Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published Ig/Jo by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Devlin, David Douglas Wordsworth and the poetry of epitaphs 1. Wordsworth, William-Criticism and interpretation I. Title 821'.7 PR5888 ISBN 978-1-349-03341-6 ISBN 978-1-349-03339-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03339-3 Contents Preface Vll List of Abbreviations lX The Poet in Search of a Public 2 The Poet in Search of a Poem 4 7 3 "The Streaks of the Tulip" 84 4 The Poem as Epitaph 107 Appendix: Dr Johnson, An Essay on Epitaphs (I 740) I 29 .Notes I37 Index I42 v Preface Wordsworth was a polemical cnt1c; his wntmgs on poetry (usually his own poetry), whether the many occasional (but not casual) comments in his letters, or the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, or the Preface to the I 8 I 5 edition of his poems (with the addi tiona} Essay, Supplementary to the Preface), are often ag gressively defensive and were either designed to forestall possible criticism or were an angry response to the strictures and blindness of his critics. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads was written to prepare the way for poems which Wordsworth himself called experimen tal and because he did not wish to be "censured for not having performed what I never attempted". The Essay, Supplementary to the Preface is a rebuke to jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. To defend himself against all attacks Wordsworth there propounds the myth that the great original writer is never appreciated in his own day; he confidently rejects all that reviewers and "the Public" can say and submits himself instead to the verdict of"the People". Wordsworth did not place a high value on criticism: "I am not a Critic-and set little value upon the art." In later years (I 830) he claimed that he had written the I8oo Preface "at the yrgent entreaties of a friend" (Coleridge) and that he regretted having anything to do with it; and in I845 he was hoping to publish an edition of his poems without "the Prefaces and Supplement". The Essays upon Epitaphs (I810) are quite different; only the first was published in his lifetime and none of them was designed for any special occasion or intended to explain any group of poems or convert an unwilling audience. In these three wise essays (they contain no special pleading, no self-justification, no confused discussion of metrics, no sublimely egotistic view of the VII Vlll Preface poet, no angry apportioning of blame), as Wordsworth talks of epitaphs a description emerges of his own finest and most typical work and his characteristic mode of "reconcilement of opposites". List of Abbreviations Er Ernest de Selincourt (e d.), The Letters fJj William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early rears IJ8J-I8o5, 2nd edn, revised C. L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967). Mr Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle rears I8o6-I820, 2nd edn, revised Mary Moorman and A. G. Hill, 2 vols (Oxford, 1969-70). Lr Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later rears J82J-I850, 3 vols (Oxford, 1939). Prose W.J. B. Owen and jane Worthington Smyser (eds), Works The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols (Oxford, 19]4.). PW Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (eds), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols (Oxford, 1940-g); vols ii and iii revised Helen Darbishire, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1952-4). IX The Poet in Search 1 of a Public Well, you see ... there's pomes and pomes, and Wudsworth's was not for sich as us. This epigraph reads like an epitaph on Wordsworth's hope that he might be read by ordinary country people, by those very rustics whose language he once considered the most suitable for poetry. The words were spoken some twenty or thirty years after Wordsworth's death by an old man who had at one time been a gardener's boy at Rydal Mount, and they were quoted in a paper read to the Wordsworth Society by H. D. Rawnsley in 1882.1 They make clear, with great firmness and some regret, Wordsworth's final failure to communicate with a large un literary public, his ~ilure to be what he insisted a poet must be, a man speaking to men. He never gave up his hopes for such an audience, but as time passed they declined into wistful regret. In a comment dictated to Isabella F ermor in 1843 on his "The Labourers' Noon-day Hymn", Wordsworth said: Bishop Ken's 'Morning and Evening Hymns' are, as they deserve to be, familiarly known. Many other hymns have also been written on the same subject; but, not being aware of any designed for Noon-day, I was induced to compose these verses. Often one has occasion to observe Cottage children carrying, in their baskets, dinner to their Fathers engaged in their daily labours in the fields and woods. How gratifying would it be to