But that journey becomes increasingly mysterious and foreboding. In ‘Strange fits of Passion I have known’, for example, the narrator recounts his seemingly ordinary horseback journey to Lucy’s cottage.
Nearly all his rhymed poems written in the frigid winter of 1798-99 deal with death, particularly the ‘Mathew’ and the ‘Lucy’ poems. In 1800, two new poems appear in the second added volume of that year’s addition of Lyrical Ballads: ‘Nutting’ and ‘There was a boy’. In ‘Simon Lee’, for example, we hear the old huntsman in a bouncing rhythm that fights with the more serious subject matter:īoth the suffering and the joy detailed in Lyrical Ballads are acknowledged and fused by Wordsworth as he hears ‘still, sad music of humanity’ and is ‘A lover of the meadows and the woods/ And mountains’, both suffering humanity and beautiful nature parts of that ‘mighty world’ which we half-create and perceive. In the best of these poems, Wordsworth merges his humanitarian concerns with an interest –fostered by his recent work on The Borderers and on The Ruined Cottage- in the psychology not only of the victim but also of the poet-narrator who, interacting with the sufferer, tells the tale. Stanzas from the first of these poems are typical: Many of these lyrics record the growth of the speaker’s perceptions as he creates and meditates upon his view of the world. Spring 1798 saw an extraordinary period of Wordsworth creative activity on lyrics and ballads. As for Wordsworth’s activity late in 1797 and early in 1798, he completed his play The Borderers, revised his tale of The Ruined Cottage by adding an account of the philosophic pedlar-narrator, and began an industrious programme of reading in preparation for his work on the vast philosophical poem The Recluse.
In order to pay the expenses of a walking tour, the two poems began the Rime of the Ancient Mariner collaboratively in November 1797, but the poem soon became Coleridge’s alone. However, Wordsworth’s brief critical statement included in Lyrical Ballads (1798) emphasizes stylistic matters: the majority of the poems were ‘experiments’ written ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’.Īs with most plans, what seemed so obvious to Wordsworth and Coleridge after Lyrical Ballads was published looks rather messy and haphazard at the start of their work on the book. The 73 year-old Wordsworth, in a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick about ‘We Are Seven’, agreed that his task was to write about subjects from common life but to treat them imaginatively.
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