POEMS BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

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by williamwordsworth

by williamwordsworth

1787

SONNET, ON SEEING MISS HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS WEEP AT A TALE OF DISTRESS[337]

She wept.--Life's purple tide began to flow

In languid streams through every thrilling vein;

Dim were my swimming eyes--my pulse beat slow,

And my full heart was swell'd to dear delicious pain.

Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye;

A sigh recall'd the wanderer to my breast;

Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh

That call'd the wanderer home, and home to rest.

That tear proclaims--in thee each virtue dwells,

And bright will shine in misery's midnight hour;

As the soft star of dewy evening tells

What radiant fires were drown'd by day's malignant pow'r,

That only wait the darkness of the night

To chear the wand'ring wretch with hospitable light.

AXIOLOGUS.

[European Magazine, 1787, vol. xi. p. 302.]

S.T.C. addressed some lines to Wordsworth under the name Axiologus. The following is a sample, sent to me by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell, Ad Vilmum Axiologum.--ED.[338]

AD VILMUM AXIOLOGUM

This be the meed, that thy song creates a thousand-fold echo!

Sweet as the warble of woods, that awakes at the gale of the morning!

List! the Hearts of the Pure, like caves in the ancient mountains

Deep, deep in the Bosom, and from the Bosom resound it,

Each with a different tone, complete or in musical fragments--

All have welcomed thy Voice, and receive and retain and prolong it!

This is the word of the Lord! it is spoken and Beings Eternal

Live and are borne as an Infant, the Eternal begets the Immortal--

Love is the Spirit of Life, and Music the Life of the Spirit!

[337] The only justification for republishing this sonnet is that it is the earliest authoritative record of Wordsworth's attempts in Verse. It is a much more authentic one than the Extract from the conclusion of a Poem, composed in anticipation of leaving School, or than the lines Written in very early Youth, and beginning

Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.

Wordsworth dated the former of these poems 1786, but I do not believe that he wrote that poem, and still less that he wrote "Calm is all nature," etc., as we now have it, in that year. Doubtless, he wrote verses on these two subjects; but the best evidence against the notion that the text, as we now have it, was written in 1786, is this 1787sonnet on Miss Maria Williams. It is not only dated authoritatively, but it was published in 1787; and therefore serves (as nothing else can until we come to 1793) as evidence in regard to the development of his poetic power. The translation of Francis Wrangham's lines--which he called The Birth of Love --in 1795, is further evidence in the same direction. No doubt there were many poor poetic utterances by Wordsworth later in life--failures in his manhood, as dismal as the"Walford Tragedy" was in his youth--but I think that the Lines written in very early Youth, and the Extract from the Poem composed in anticipation of leaving School, were rehandled by him, and the text greatly improved before they were first published. The late Mr. J.Dykes Campbell wrote to me in 1892: "Poets tell dreadful fibs about their early verses--as witness S.T.C. who declared he wrote The Advent of Love at fifteen! I know he didn't, and am going to print one or two of his prize school verses of that age, which I have found in his own fifteen-year-old fist."--ED.

[338] I should add, in a footnote, that I have no knowledge of the source whence Mr. Campbell derived this; but I am sure that it must have reached him from an authentic one.--ED.