This last chapter discusses two of Wordsworth’s last poems, written when he was seventy-five – poems about old, poor men in their last days, approaching death. Written in 1846, these poems echo the sea poems of the mid-1830s in that they depict people who have been left lonely and isolated, in this case by the death of loved ones. Wordsworth shows extreme old age as a time of alienation, even when the aged person lives where he has always lived. His family having died, he has no one with whom to practise the daily rituals and routines that renew love and secure identity. Memory and recollection do not suffice to restore the missing presence; the self cannot sustain itself by enshrining the spirit of the past. Expressing this bleak view about the limitations of memorialisation, the poems are in dialogue with Wordsworth’s past work: they depict the aged like the sailor of ‘Composed by the Sea Shore’ and the heroine of ‘The Somnambulist’, but unlike the Wordsworth of The Prelude. They are also in dialogue with a large and noisy public campaign, in which the life, and the death, of the elderly poor was a controversial topic.

This chapter investigates a poem in its markedly different 1811 and 1842 versions: the epistle to Sir George Beaumont, a verse-missive addressed from the Cumbrian coast, where Wordsworth had gone with his family to benefit his children’s health. Supplementing the prose letters that Wordsworth and Beaumont exchanged, it continues a dialogue with his friend and patron. Colloquial and yet structured, it reveals Wordsworth forging verse conditions to reshape the country-house poems developed by Ben Jonson, in which the address of patron by poet had modelled a virtuous sociability exemplified in the moral community of the landed estate. Wordsworth transforms the Jonsonian model so that exemplary community takes the form of intimate, domestic sociability based on the dales family rather than the country house. Modelling chatty friendship and describing family life, his epistle is an alternative to the blank-verse celebration of rustic society that had stalled in ‘Home at Grasmere’ and to the rustic speech that, had formerly narrated the troubles of rural folk. It is a prime example of the ‘new’ later Wordsworth experimenting with a traditional form, and with the comic rather than the egotistical sublime, as he turned away from the solitary communion with nature he had explored in The Prelude.

This chapter investigates the formal and generic experimentation of four late poems that rework the concerns of the Lyrical Ballads for the new contexts – public and private – of the late 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. Several intertwined themes run through my discussion: Wordsworth’s efforts to set his new poems in a circle of writers and readers, substituting for the old Grasmere circle but more socially conventional; his critical response to the tales and romances of Scott and Hemans; his renewed interest in people, especially women, who, by virtue of dwelling at or beyond society’s borders, communicate with or embody the world of death, and the feminism of this interest and the limitations of this feminism.

This chapter discusses an 1805 walk that Wordsworth did with Humphry Davy and Walter Scott,and the poetry that resulted from it. It investigates the interwoven and time-dependent relationships between place, people and poetry, and the post-1805 development of Romantic verse as a group discourse. It examines each of the walker’s responses in turn, and seeks, in particular, to evaluate the inflection of Wordsworth’s later poetry by the words that Scott and Davy brought to that 1805 fell-walk.

On 1 August 1845, the MP for Finsbury Thomas Wakley rose to his feet in the House of Commons and asked a disconcerting question of the Home Secretary. Had he any information about conditions in Andover workhouse, for it was reported that the poor people confined there ‘were employed in crushing bones, and that, while so employed, they were in the habit of quarrelling with each other about the bones, of extracting the marrow from them, and of gnawing the meat which they sometimes found at their extremities’?

This chapter examineswhat happened to apostrophe, to invocation – to Wordsworth’s bardic stance as the voicer of the spirits of nature and of the dead—when he came face to face with modernity – with a Scotland and Lake District accessed via a mechanised tourist infrastructure: motion automated and at speed. Steam boats and railway lines, I argue, left him in a representational quandary. They not only disrupted his established ways of knowing nature visually but also challenged his self-chosen task of bringing the inner, spiritual meaning of place into voice by speaking for its dead. Rather than reject the new technology for that reason; however, he attempted to be its bard and to call its transformation of space and time into poetic speech.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

After 1805, Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by embracing the permanence of art. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomizing endurance beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief. Some of these kinds of elegy are explored in this chapter.

In this chapter, I assess a pair of poems linked by their occasion – the moon seen from the seashore – by their place of composition – the Cumbrian coast—by their date – the mid 1830s – and by their scenario – the lonely sailor at sea in the dark allegorising men and women’s position in the world. I construe the poems as among Wordsworth’s most searching meditations on disappointment, alienation, loss and depression – and on poetry’s role in articulating aspects of spacetime that might mollify, if not cure, what he reveals to be the human predicament.