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by Fred Blick
 
Aging is intrinsic to Wordsworth’s poetry. He declared in 1800, in his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, ‘I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Recollection inevitably involves aging. It follows that recollection in general, and of ‘spots of time’ in particular, were significant features of his inspiration. Recollection helped him mentally and physically to adapt to aging:

There are in existence spots of time,
Which with distinct prominence retain
A renovating virtue, (The Prelude, 1805, Book Twelfth, ll. 257-9).

 
During Wordsworth’s lifetime, life expectancy in England hovered around forty years, but it increased the older one survived. In 1798, when Lyrical Ballads was first published, William Wordsworth was aged twenty-eight, Samuel Coleridge twenty-six and William’s sister, Dorothy, twenty-seven, and folk in their sixties would have been considered old. Dorothy and William lost their mother Ann when she was thirty-one and when they were six and seven respectively. Their father John died aged forty-two when Dorothy was twelve and William thirteen. Coleridge’s father, a vicar with a comfortable living, died at the good old age of sixty-three, when Coleridge was eight.
 
In the first two editions of Lyrical Ballads some of Wordsworth’s references to the old appear to be quite objective and distant – almost cruel. This attitude is first demonstrated by his poems ‘Animal Tranquillity and Decay‘ (1798) and ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (written 1798, published 1800). The former refers to an old man who in ‘Animal Tranquillity’

  … is by nature led
To peace so perfect that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels. (ll. 12-14).

 Likewise the ‘Beggar’ declares that the Old Beggar was ‘not … useless’ to society simply because he made his donors feel good by

 … thought
Of self congratulation, to the heart
Of each recalling his own boon, (ll.124-6).

 
The 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads included the poem ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, which Wordsworth wrote in the spring of 1798, shortly after borrowing Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794-6). From this book he took the story of farmer Harry Gill’s mental and physical illness following his cruel ensnaring of  ‘old Goody Blake’ for pilfering sticks from his hedge to keep herself warm in the winter. Although the old lady is pitiable, the poem’s style is of skilful but dispassionate reportage, leaving the reader to decide whether or not to be sympathetic. It is as if at the age of twenty-eight to thirty, Wordsworth was observing and learning the lessons of old age, rather than associating himself closely with its travails.
 
The second edition of Lyrical Ballads of 1800, includes Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ (written late 1800). This displays a more empathetic approach. Speaking in the first person, the poet associates his own love of Nature with the main character of the story, Michael, ‘An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb:

 … having felt the power of Nature
[He] led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life
. (ll. 28-33).

 
By March 1802 Wordsworth had developed a profound awareness of his own aging. In ‘The Rainbow’, composed that month, he considers the possibility of losing the child-like sense of wonder at the sight of a rainbow ‘when I shall grow old’. Such a loss would be tantamount to dying. The prospect of the loss of the Child’s glorious vision is made all the more real in ‘Ode: Intimations of  Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, the first four stanzas of which he wrote next day: ‘The Rainbow comes and goes … There hath past away a glory from the earth.’ From then on Wordsworth ‘eye … kept watch o’er man’s mortality’ (ll. 198-9) and he certainly became more aware of his own (and mankind’s) aging. But the poetic recollection of his ‘spots  of time ’ was a continual, renovating comfort to him, reminding him of infinity and eternity.
turner_buttermere_lake_with_park_of_cromackwater
After writing ‘The Rainbow’ and the ‘Ode’, premature mortality was soon to impact upon William’s own life when his brother John drowned in a shipwreck in 1805. The deaths of two of his children were to follow in 1812. In 1814 Wordsworth quotes an ‘old Man’ dolefully thus,

             I see around me here
Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left. (The Excursion, Book First, The Wanderer, ll. 469-740).

There is much philosophical consideration of age and mortality in this long poem, the publication of which followed his more immediate experiences of loss mentioned above. But, as if by way of compensation, Wordsworth never forgot his belief in ‘infinity’. In The Prelude of 1805 he declares,

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there (Book Sixth, ll. 538- 9).

which is echoed in what he writes in Book Thirteen.

The feeling of life endless, the one thought
By which we live, infinity and God. (ll. 183-4 ).

By the power of ‘Imagination’ (l. 525) he can see mankind’s place in eternity, as he does in ‘Tintern Abbey’:

a sense sublime
Of something far more interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round earth and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. … (ll. 95- 102)

 
Wordsworth’s middle and late years were marked by further losses. Charles Lamb died in1834, Coleridge in 1834, Robert Jones, his companion in the Alps, in 1835, his sister-in -law Sara Hutchinson  the same year, Robert Southey in 1843, and his brother Christopher in 1846, and his daughter Dora in 1847, at the age of forty-three. And while Wordsworth remained in fairly good health and mentally active, there were times when Dorothy was very severely ill, both physically and mentally, though she continued to write letters and some verse until 1853. She survived William and died in 1855 at the age of eighty three. Brother and sister each had life spans of almost twice the national average that had prevailed when they were born.
Dorothy 2
Only four years before his death, Wordsworth wrote ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’. The poem probably owes much to his memory of Dorothy’s love for a robin when she was very ill. She fed this intimate pet and shed tears for it when the household was given a cat (William then saw to it that cats were banned from the house). The poem tells of an old Man who lived ‘as in a Prisoner’s cell’ in an alms house, where he fed a robin. The last lines are imbued with a profound truth about the power of love and friendship in old age:

O that the good old Man had power to prove,
By message sent through air or visible token,
That still he loves the Bird, and still must love;
That friendship lasts though fellowship is broken.

Robin_in_the_snow_3_(4250400943)

Fred Blick is an independent scholar from a multi-disciplinary background. He has published a number of essays over the past twenty years; not only “Wordsworth’s Dark Joke in ‘The Barberry-Tree’” in Romanticism journal in October 2014, but also innovative essays in peer-reviewed academic journals worldwide on the subjects of the Sonnets of William Shakespeare and of Edmund Spenser.

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