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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
On 5 February 1805 John Wordsworth, the poet's brother, drowned when the ship he was commanding was wrecked off the English coast near Weymouth. No one would want to deny Ernest de Selincourt's assertion that his death was “the most terrible blow that either William or Dorothy had ever suffered”; it can easily be taken, as it often is, as the blow which signals the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power, his shift to Christianity, and his withdrawal into the isolation of Rydal Mount. There is justification for seeing in John's death such crippling force, but the story is more interesting and less conclusive, particularly as it relates to Wordsworth's poetic development, which is what will concern us here.
1 Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford, 1933), p. 187.
2 The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787–1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 321; hereafter cited as EL.
3 EL, pp. 430, 438.
4 An exception might be made in the case of John's letters to Mary Hutchinson during 1800 and 1801, according to Mary E. Burton, ed. The Letters of Mary Wordsworth: 1800–1865 (Oxford, 1958), p. xxiii n.
5 Sara Coleridge and Henry Reed, ed. Leslie Nathan Broughton (Ithaca, N. Y., 1937), p. 84.
6 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), i, 118; hereafter cited as MY.
7 “Wordsworth's Shipwreck,” PMLA, lxxvii (1962), 240–247.
8 Sara Coleridge and Henry Reed, p. 85.
9 Christopher Wordsworth was the first to see that Wordsworth had his brother in mind in this characterization, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (London, 1851), i, 285–286.
10 MY, i, 129. Wordsworth's explication is unusually revealing and should be read in its entirety.
11 Henry Adams, writing on the death of his sister, provides a startling parallel to Wordsworth at this time: “The last lesson—the sum and term of education—began then. He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen Nature—only her surface—the sugar-coating that she shows to youth. Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life. ... The usual anodynes of social medicine became evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion was the most human; but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.” The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), pp. 287–289.
12 See E. Vernon Arnold, Roman Stoicism (Cambridge, Eng., 1911), p. 126.
18 Wordsworth's three poems on dogs, written at this time, provide a macabre parallel to his situation, though one hardly imagines he was aware of it. Like Music, the dog in “Incident Characteristic of a Favourite Dog,” he was watching over his drowned brother, making “efforts with complainings; nor gives o'er / Until her fellow sinks to re-appear no more.” All three poems celebrate the Stoic ideal of faithfulness.
14 Jane Worthington, Wordsworth's Reading of Roman Prose (New Haven, 1946), p. 66.
15 Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth (Oxford, 1957), p. 573.
16 Edith Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge, Eng., 1933), p. 35 n.
17 Accompanying the “Elegiac Verses” and “To the Daisy” in a booklet in the hand of Sara Hutchinson was “Distressful Gift,” a minor poem written at the same time, in which Wordsworth speaks of John's death in terms of a book of his own poems that John will never see. See the Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1947), iv, 372–373.
18 Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion, Univ. of California Pubs. in English, xii (Berkeley, 1942), 1–181.
19 We hear the same tone in a poem written three months later, “November 1806”: “we must stand unpropped, or be laid low. / O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer!”
20 The line from The Prelude appears in the context of a description of Wordsworth's youthful acquaintance with the nature of Man, but I would agree with F. R. Leavis that the lines apply to Wordsworth's characteristic stance. See Revaluations (London, 1936), pp. 181–182.
21 That such a conflict existed in Wordsworth's mind is also suggested by Robert Daniel in the course of an explication of lines 15–16, The Explicator, ii (1943), 5, and by D. W. Harding in discussing the same lines, “The Hinterland of Thought,” in Experience into Words (London, 1963), pp. 185–186.
22 “To the Same Flower (‘With little here to do or see‘).”
