Wordsworth notes of this poem: "Written at Town-end, Grasmere. The Sheepfold, on which so much of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and circumstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many years before, the house we live in at Town-end, along with some fields and woodlands on the eastern shore of Grasmere. The name of the Evening Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side of the valley, more to the north." Wordsworth lived at Grasmere from 1799 to 1813. MY HEART LEAPS UP 406. 9. Natural piety. Reverence, affection for Nature. Wordsworth chose the last three lines for the motto of his Ode: Intimations of Immortality. RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE 407. 43. I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous Boy. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who poisoned himself, in a fit of despondency, before he was eighteen years old. 45. Him who walked in glory. Burns. 97. Grave Livers. Persons of solemn deportment. runs ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY 413. A part of Wordsworth's note on the poem as follows: "Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. It was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the Spirit within me. . . . To that dream-like vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood, everyone, I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here: but having in the poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an element in our instincts of immortality." The argument of the poem proceeds from stanza to stanza as follows: I. I can no longer see the celestial beauty which once enfolded every object in nature. 2. Nature is the same, but the glory has passed away. 3. The utterance of this thought brought relief from the sadness it occasioned: "No more shall grief of mine the season wrong." 4. Despite the happiness of Nature on this sweet May-morning," the glory and the dream" have gone; "whither is fled the visionary gleam? 413. 5. The child brings with him into this world recollections of Heaven; the older we become the farther we journey from the celestial vision of childhood, till at length "the Man perceives it die away, "Forget the glories he hath known, 8. Why should he do this, and hurry him- 9. Let us give thanks for the "shadowy recollections which persist from childhood into maturity to uphold and cherish us. 10. Even though the celestial radiance has now departed from the world, I can still be joyful, finding strength in human sympathy, and In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind." 11. And Nature still is beautiful, for the love I feel for her is strengthened and enriched by years of experience with the world, and by sympathetic association with men. tenth of November, 1793, the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Notre Dame Cathedral. 418. 66. From bleak Helvetia's icy caverns. The ode was occasioned by the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798. 66 KUBLA KHAN 419. Coleridge writes, in his preface to the poem: In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he [Coleridge] fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business. and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found that. all the rest had passed away.' Professor William A. Neilson, in his recent Essentials of Poetry, writes: "In . . . Coleridge's Kubla Khan we have no wrestling with spiritual questions, no lofty solution of the problem of conduct found through brooding on the beauties of nature. Instead, a thousand impressions received from the senses, from records of Oriental travel, from numberless romantic tales, have been taken in by the author, dissolved as in a crucible by the fierce heat of his imagination, and are poured forth a molten stream of sensuous imagery, incalculable in its variety of suggestion, yet homogeneous, unified, and, despite its fragmentary character, the ultimate expression of a whole romantic world" (p. 43). THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER . . . In Wordsworth's note on his own poem, We Are Seven, the following passage explains the origin of the Ancient Mariner: In the spring of the year 1798 [Coleridge], my sister, and myself, started to visit Linton. In the course of this walk was planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner, founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend, Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention; but certain parts I myself suggested:for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime, and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages a day or two before that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses. 'Suppose,' said I, you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary Spirits of those regions take upon them to avenge the crime!' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. We began the composition together on that, to me, memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular: 'And listened like a three years' child; The Mariner had his will.'" The poem was first printed in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Many archaisms, intended to make it resemble the popular ballads, and a few stanzas, were afterwards removed. The marginal gloss was added when the poem appeared in the Sybilline Leaves, 1817. FROST AT MIDNIGHT 430. The poem was written in February, 1798, while Coleridge was living in his cottage at Nether-Stowey. 7. My cradled infant. His son Hartley. 431. 25. At school. Coleridge entered Christ's Hospital when he was ten years old, and remained there till he went up to Cambridge University in 1791. Cf. Lamb's Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, p. 512. 27. That fluttering stranger. "A flake or film of soot hanging on the bar of a grate, supposed to foretell the advent of a stranger." (English Dialect Dictionary.) 38. The stern preceptor. Boyer, the famous 'flogging master of Christ's Hospital. 43. Sister more beloved. Between Coleridge and his sister Ann, who died in 1791, there was a strong attachment. 55. Thou, my babe! shalt wander, etc. The prophecy in these lines was fulfilled when in 1800 Coleridge moved to Greta Hall, Keswick, in the lake district. DEJECTION: AN ODE 433. The poem was first printed on the fourth of October, 1802,-the day of Words worth's marriage-in the Morning Post. Although Wordsworth's name did not appear in this version, it was in fact addressed to him. Later, after an estrangement between the two poets, Coleridge revised and enlarged the ode. The first form is printed in the Globe edition of Coleridge's works, p. 522. 433. 25. O Lady! In the earlier version, here and throughout the poem, O Edmund! under which pseudonym Coleridge addressed Wordsworth. 40. What can these avail. What can these beauties of nature avail? 435. 120. As Otway's self. Originally as Edmund's self." 66 HARP OF THE NORTH 443. This is a sort of epilogue to The Lady of the Lake. JOCK OF HAZELDEAN 444. The first stanza is traditional; see F. J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v. 159, for the older John of Hazelgreen on which Scott modelled his song. BRIGNALL BANKS From Rokeby. COUNTY GUY 445. From Quentin Durward. BONNY DUNDEE From The Doom of Devorgoil. 1. Claver'se. John Graham of Claverhouse (1649?-1689), an ardent and successful partisan of Charles II, won the title bloody Claver'se" by his persecution of the Scottish Dissenters during the last years of Charles's reign. In 1688 he was created first Viscount Dundee by James II. After James's flight, Claverhouse maintained a royal army in Scotland, and won the battle of Killiecrankie in July, 1689, but died of a wound the night of the victory. The incident referred to in the poem took place March 18, 1688, when Claverhouse rode out of Edinburgh at the head of some fifty dragoons, having bolted the Convention that was to determine Scotland's attitude towards James II. 13. The Bow. Bow Street, Edinburgh. 14. Ilk carline was flyting and shaking her pow. Every old woman was scolding and wagging her head. 15. The young plants of grace they looked couthie and slee. The young men looked kindly and sly. 17. The Grassmarket. An open square in the center of the city, formerly used for public executions. See The Heart of Midlothian, Chapter ii. 21. Cowls of Kilmarnock. The Presbyterian Whigs, who were all anti-Stuart. 22. Lang hafted gullies. Long handled knives. 23. Close-head. The entrance to a blind alley. (Engl. Dialect Dictionary.) 25. Castle rock. Edinburgh Castle stands on a high rock above the city. 27. Mons Meg and her marrows. Meg was a famous cannon of unusual size. Mons 30. Montrose. James Graham (16121650), fifth Earl and first Marquis of Montrose, was Charles I's most successful lieutenant during the Civil War. He was captured and executed by the Earl of Argyle in 1650. 456. 703. The Niobe of nations. Niobe, all of whose children were slain by Apollo and Diana because of her pride, stands as a symbol of grief and suffering. 457. 732. When Brutus, etc. The reference is to the murder of Julius Cæsar by Brutus and the other conspirators. See North's translation of Plutarch, p. 91, this volume. 734. Tully. Marcus Tullius Cicero. 459. 1648. I have loved thee, Ocean. Byron was a swimmer of extraordinary ability. DON JUAN: DEDICATION 460. 1. Bob Southey! You're a Poet. The satiric dedication to Robert Southey was only one shot in the war between the two men. See the Introduction to Byron's Vision of Judgment. 3. You turned out a Tory. Southey, like Coleridge, was an enthusiastic republican in his young manhood; later he became strongly conservative. 5. My Epic Renegade. Byron probably has in mind Southey's early work, Wat Tyler, which was strongly republican, and was published contrary to Southey's wishes after he had given up his republicanism. 13. Coleridge . . . explaining metaphysics to the nation. During the latter part of his life Coleridge all but abandoned poetry in favor of philosophy. The Biographia Literaria was published in 1817. 25. Wordsworth, in a rather long "Excursion." Wordsworth's philosophical poem, The Excursion, was published in 1814. 132. Buff and blue. Here used, as often, as symbolic of republicanism. CANTO III 690. Sappho. The only woman among the world's great poets. She lived approximately 600 B. C. 692. Delos. A Greek island, the birthplace of Phoebus Apollo. 695. The Scian and the Teian muse. Homer and Anacreon, so called from their birthplaces, real or supposed, Scio and Teos, respectively.. 701. Marathon. The battle of Marathon, fought in 490 B. C. between the Persians and the Greeks, resulted in an overwhelming victory for the latter. It took place on the plains of Marathon, overlooking the sea. 708. Salamis. In 480 B. C. the Greek fleet under Themistocles defeated the Persian fleet. The battle was fought in the strait between the island of Salamis and the mainland of Attica.. 461. 730. Thermopylæ. The most famous battle at the pass of Thermopyla was the contest in 480 B. C. between Leonidas and three hundred Spartans, and the Persian army of Xerxes. 743. Pyrrhic dance. A martial dance. 744. Pyrrhic phalanx. Pyrrhus (318?272 B. C.), King of Epirus, achieved several military successes through his use of the closely massed phalanx. 747. You have the letters Cadmus gave. Cadmus, one of the world's "culture heroes,' was supposed to have given the alphabet to men. 751. Anacreon's 755. Tyrant of the Chersonese. Mil- 762. Suli's rock and Parga's shore. The 766. Heracleidan. Of Hercules. 779. Sunium's marbled steep. A ruined temple at Sunium, or Cape Colonna, served as a landmark for vessels approaching the southern extremity of Attica. 462. 813. Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle. Edmund Hoyle (16721769), whose Short Treatise on Whist was published in 1742, was long the unquestioned authority on the game. 815. The great Marlborough. . . . Life by Archdeacon Coxe. William Coxe (1747-1828), archdeacon of Wiltshire, published his Memoirs of John, Duke of Marlborough in the years 1818 and 1819. Marlborough is, of course, Queen Anne's great general. 819. An independent being. Probably a pun; during the latter part of his life Milton was a member of the religious sect known as Independents." 821. His life falling into Johnson's way. Dr. Johnson's life of Milton, in his Lives of the Poets, is unsympathetic. ... 826. Lord Bacon's bribes. These are facts; the stories concerning Cæsar, Shakespeare, etc., may be apocryphal. 828. Burns (whom Doctor Currie well describes). Dr. James Currie (17561805) published an edition of Burns's works, with a memoir, in 1800. 833. Southey. Pantisocracy. Southey and Coleridge were the two leaders in an attempt, which came to naught, to found an ideal commonwealth on the banks of the Susquehanna River. 835. Wordsworth unexcised, unhired. In the year 1812 Wordsworth was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland. The office was worth £400 per year. |