| Title | : | Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0375759417 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780375759413 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 784 |
| Publication | : | First published September 1, 1879 |
Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth Reviews
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Chronology
Introduction & Notes
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
--Old Man Travelling
--The Ruined Cottage
--A Night-Piece
--The Old Cumberland Beggar
--Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House
--Goody Blake and Harry Gill
--The Thorn
--The Idiot Boy
--Lines Written in Early Spring
--Anecdote for Fathers
--We Are Seven
--Expostulation and Reply
--The Tables Turned
--Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
--The Fountain
--The Two April Mornings
--'A slumber did my spirit seal'
--Song ('She dwelt among th' untrodden ways')
--'Strange fits of passion I have known'
--Lucy Gray
--Nutting
--'Three years she grew in sun and shower'
--The Brothers
--Hart-Leap Well
--from 'Home at Grasmere'
from 'Poems on the Naming of Places':
--To Joanna
--'A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags'
--Michael
--'I travelled among unknown Men'
--To a Sky-Lark
--Alice Fell
--Beggars
--To a Butterfly ('Stay near me')
--To the Cuckoo
--'My heart leaps up when I behold'
--To H. C., Six Years Old
--'Among all lovely things my Love had been'
--To a Butterfly ('I've watched you')
--Resolution and Independence
--'Within our happy Castle there dwelt one'
--'The world is too much with us'
--'With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh'
--'Dear Native Brooks your ways have I pursued'
--'Great Men have been among us'
--'It is not to be thought of that the Flood'
--'When I have borne in memory what has tamed'
--'England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean'
--Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais
--'It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free'
--To Toussaint L'Ouverture
--Composed in the Valley, near Dover, on the Day of Landing
--Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
--London, 1802
--'Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room'
--Yarrow Unvisited
--'She was a Phantom of delight'
--Ode to Duty
--Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
--'I wandered lonely as a Cloud'
--Stepping Westward
--The Solitary Reaper
--Elegiac Stanzas
--A Complaint
--Gipsies
--St Paul's
--'Surprized by joy -- impatient as the Wind'
--Yew-Trees
--Composed at Cora Linn
--Yarrow Visited
--To R. B. Haydon, Esq. ('High is our calling, Friend!')
--Sequel to the Foregoing [Beggars]
--Ode: Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty
--The River Duddon: Conclusion
--'The unremitting voice of nightly streams'
--Airey-Force Valley
--Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg
--'Glad sight wherever new with old'
--At Furness Abbey
--'I know an aged Man constrained to dwell'
from 'The Prelude':
--Book I
--Book II
--Book III
--Book IV
--Book V
--Book VI
--Book VII
--Book VIII
--Book IX
--Book X
--Book XI
--Book XII
--Book XIII
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines -
"I've come too far to watch some name dropping sleaze, tell me what are my Wordsworth."
—Taylor Swift (she's an icon, she's a legend and she is the moment) in her song "The Lakes"
I just wanted to note that, and here are some highlights from William's poems:
"My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life’s business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?"
«This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.»
"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give."
"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."
"With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation." -
সেপ্টেম্বরে কি পড়ে শেষ করতে পারলাম, তা নিয়ে নিয়মিত লেখার চেষ্টা করি। বেশিরভাগ সময়ই কোন বই নিয়ে আলাদা করে এখানে রিভিউ লিখলে সেই লেখায় আর ঐ বই নিয়ে অতো আলাপ করতে ইচ্ছা করে না। যেটা নিয়ে আলাদা করে লেখা হয় না, সেটা নিয়েই তাতে কথা বলি। সেখানেই এখনো নিজেকে কবিতা নিয়ে ‘বকলম’ ভাবা আমি কোনমতে একটা অনুচ্ছেদ যুক্ত করেছি এই বই নিয়ে। সেই অনুচ্ছেদ কবিতার ব্যবচ্ছেদে (সম্ভব নয় আমার দ্বারা) মনোযোগী হয় নি, শুধু অনুভূতির বয়ানে সীমাবদ্ধে থেকেছে। সেটা এখানে তুলে দিচ্ছি—-
‘…..ওয়ার্ডসওয়ার্থের সিলেক্টেড পোয়েমস ধরেছিলাম চার বছর আগে। কিনেছিলামও মনে হয় সে সময়েই। এর আগে কোনদিনই কোন ইংরেজী রোমান্টিক কবি বা সে আমলের বা কাছাকাছি অন্য যুগের কবিতার বই পড়ার চেষ্টা করি নি। সাধ্যাতীত মনে হতো, এখনো মনে হয়। তারপর গতবছর ঠিক করলাম চাপ না নিয়ে পড়ে যাব। আর কবিতা জানি না কে কিভাবে পড়ে, আমার বেলায় অল্প অল্প করে পড়লেই মনে হয় কথাগুলোর একটা রেশ থাকে মনে। সুনীল তাঁর কোন এক বইয়ে লিখেছিলেন যে তিনি একটানে কবিতার বই পড়তে পারতেন না, সেই তথ্যও আসলে উৎসাহব্যঞ্জক ছিল। যাই হোক, ওয়ার্ডসওয়ার্থের কবিতা পড়ে ইংরেজী বাক্যকে কতোভাবে অলংকৃত ও গভীর করা যায়, তা জানলাম। বাংলার মতো তো ইংরেজী বাক্য ভেঙে ফেলা যায় না, তাই মনে হতো যে একটা গন্ডিতে গঠন বুঝেই যা লেখার লিখতে গিয়ে বাংলার তুলনায় একটু হলেও তা নীরস হয়ে পড়ে হয়তো। যেহেতু পড়িই নি একেবারে, এই ধারণাটার আসলে তেমন ভিত্তিই নেই। যদিও এ সময়ের কিছু কবিদের কবিতা ভালো লেগেছে টুকটাক। সাহসে কুলোচ্ছিল না বলেই পড়া শুরু করেও থেমে গিয়েছিলাম। আবার পড়তে গিয়ে যাকে বলে মুগ্ধ হয়ে গেলাম সত্যি সত্যিই। ওয়ার্ডসওয়ার্থ এক কথায় অসাধারণ। তিনি গল্প বলে যেতে থাকেন কবিতার মধ্য দিয়ে, একেক সময়ে সেটা ছোট গল্পের ভ্রমও তৈরি করে। ওদিকে ভাষা নিয়ে, নিজস্ব দর্শন নিয়ে তাঁর কবিতার নানা পংক্তি নিঃসন্দেহে ভাবিয়ে তুলে। এরপর আবার সেই আমলের কার কবিতার বই পড়া যায় ভাবছি। ওয়ার্ডসওয়ার্থ পড়ে এটা বুঝেছি যে কেন এতো বছর পরেও তাঁর কবিতা প্রাসঙ্গিক।…’ -
I am not a fan of Wordsworth. I find his poems veering towards the sentimental and obscure. I think his influence in this direction has been mostly negative. But I can respect his ability to put one word after another, and his status as a pioneer - albeit of lands I have no wish to tread.
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"Hei-de lembrar-me destas mesmas plumas,
Das ervas e das heras nas paredes
Por mudas gotas de água orvalhadas,
Que um dia no meu peito infundiram
Imagens de remanso e plenitude,
Tão calmas, tão serenas, e tão belas,
Por entre os pensamentos mais inquietos,
De modo que o pesar e o desespero
Que advêm da mudança e da ruína,
São formas transitórias da existência
Que passam como um sonho indolente
Deixando em seu lugar meditação.
Assim me fiz à estrada e fui feliz." -
Conversation with Not while crossing Westminster Bridge earlier this afternoon:
N: Let's get off this bridge and go somewhere where there aren't so many fucking tourists.
Me: Hey! Remember Earth hath not anything to show more fair!
[Pause]
N: Than what? -
"E plo poder que bendizemos,
Que vive em toda a parte,
As nossas almas mediremos:
De amor será a arte.
Por isso, irmã, faz-me um favor,
Põe roupa para a serra, vamos:
E livros nada, não senhor!
Pois hoje nós folgamos." -
Quando, por vezes, surge a pergunta [complicada] "qual é o teu poema/poeta favorito?", não demoro muito a responder:
"...What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind."
William Wordsworth.
--
É sempre tão boa a leitura de Wordsworth, uma infinita nostalgia fica connosco quando o livro termina. E ler uma edição bilíngüe enriquece sempre qualquer leitura. A lista de poetas que concorrem com Wordsworth é extensa: Shelley, Lord Byron, Coleridge, Keats... Mas em Wordsworth encontramos o mundo bucólico, a ode à folha que cai, um hino à vida que se desgasta e nos deixa. -
É sempre um deleite para a alma ler a poesia de William Wordsworth.
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I can't find the version I read (Folio Society edited by Seamus Heaney) on GoodReads so this will have to do!
I can't believe that I hadn't read much Wordsworth before. I think my greater appreciation of the natural world and long walks during lockdown made Wordworth's poetry even more powerful to me. I was also surprised by how many poems dealt with issues of class and family bonds, which I wasn't expecting, and his appreciation of his own privileged position. Cannot recommend enough! -
I loved rereading these poems for Febregency.
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I read a selection of the poems found in this book. Isn't the cover gorgeous? I bought this Kindle version, but I wish I could have bought the book. Maybe I'll sneak out to Barnes and Noble sometime and try to find it.
You know, I appreciate William Wordsworth much more now than I did in college. I never thought of Wordsworth as one of my favorite poets—I like Emily Dickinson and Frost plus others. But, I think he might move up a bit on my list of favorites. I like the rapturous emotion in his poems, and I love his descriptive scenes of nature. I found lots of great quotes.
His theme of the carefree nature of children and their enjoyment in nature was great. It was joyful to read, and that theme seemed to carry through many of his poems. His descriptions of the restrictive and dry nature of education was sad.
Wordsworth said, “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
This quote reminds me of Lines Written in Early Spring “I hear a thousand blended notes,/While in a grove I sate reclined,/In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” He goes on to reflect “Have I not reason to lament/What man has made of man?” That seems like his most moody poem or most melancholy.
And what about The Prelude when he came home for summer break after being away at Cambridge,
“Those walks in all their freshness now came back
Like a returning Spring. When first I made
Once more the circuit of our little lake,
If ever happiness hath lodged with man,
That day consummate happiness was mine,
Wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative. . .
Gently did my soul
Put off her veil, and, self-transmuted, stood
Naked, as in the presence of her God.”
I kept trying to figure out if Nature was his god or if he did bring God into it. He capitalized Nature as a Being almost. And sometimes I was sure he worshiped Nature and other times I thought he was just revitalized by it all. He does use the words Worship and Nature together.
He says in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey: “We stood together; and that I, so long/A worshipper of Nature, hither came/ Unwearied in that service.”
Then he says in The Prelude—“I am content/With my own modest pleasures, and have lived/With God and Nature communing.”
And after reading a bit on the internet, I don't think experts agree. So, I surely don't know, but it seemed to me at first glance that he treated God and Nature equally. One thing for sure, he's definitely a Romantic Poet. -
Wordsworth is a guilty dislike for me. So many poets don't only like him but credit him with their very inspiration as to what poetry is and should be. Last summer I endeavored to make peace with Wordsworth once and for all. I skipped the juvenelia, and went straight for the "young" Wordsworth. My complaints I can find very quickly--many many poems about A man wandering unhappy, ill at ease, or at least lonely--he encounters daffodils/a leech gatherer/nature's primal majesty and whatever was bothering him (it's never mentioned, P thinks he was probably irritated that his sister didn't press his shirts right) evaporates away. I find Wordsworth extraordinarily earnest--and if you take any Romanticism class they will go on and on about how "going back to nature" is supposed to be the cure towards the "evils of society."
The trouble is, I don't know if Wordsworth believed it. How many times did he see nature in his mind and not in reality? Also, the very fact that he wrote these poems, aren't they now mere memories and not the reality anymore? And also, if nature is the perfect balm why is he always wandering (I mean it doesn't sound as if the man is on his afternoon constitutional--he is endlessly wandering and searching.) Curiously, this take on him made him much more stomachable for me---I'm much more interested in people saying "What is this?" than "This is it!" Old Wordsworth is much less interesting--he gets preachy, moralistic, and becomes a voice for the old guard. But who can blame him--he long outlived his peers, and was finding himself struggling to be relevant in a new (extremely prosaic) age. I can say I can put my Wordsworth ambivalence to rest, and though I will never entirely like him, I can tip my hat in respect. -
This is proof that tastes change as you age: at university I was not a fan, but now William has the power to move me to tears!
I much prefer his earlier work, and I disagree that 'The Prelude' is his greatest work. It does what William wanted it to do - to keep him in people's minds as a great poet; and he is a great poet. -
2.5/5 Semi enjoyed and good narration for the audiobook.
I really enjoyed the narrator for this and loved that they listed off some facts about the poet and his life. I liked the flow of the poems but didn't enjoy the poems themselves all that much. I wouldn't mind picking this up physically to see if I like it better in that format.
For my GR friends sorry for the spam of reads and reviews I'm a bit behind on my goal of trying to read a book for every day of the month/year (started this in march so it's not my Goodreads reading goal). Summer term is shorter than the other quarters and I added an extra class for this term and I've been dealing with getting on a medication and then having to get off of it because it messed up my vision so I have been pretty miserable and busy lol. -
i'm torn on wordsworth. 'she dwelt' was probably my favourite of the 15 we studied in class and thus I wanted to explore more of his poetry. however, i found a lot of his poetry was repetitive, with similar vocabulary and themes. i definitely enjoyed his more concise poems than his longer tales. some of his poems were breathtaking and some were duds. while i admit i'm a novice when it comes to reading and enjoying poetry (as opposed to studying it), it was more by force of will than desire of heart I completed his poetry.
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i probably wouldn't read wordsworth's entire prelude, the shorter version at the end of this collection was long enough. my favourite poems were about his time in france, 'We are Seven', 'She was a phantom of delight' and, 'At Furness Abbey'
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A good collection of Wordsworth's wonderful poems.
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I didn’t read this collection specifically. I had to read a h*ck ton from an anthology and did not enjoy it, so I needed to document it in some way so that it at least counted for my book challenge. Thx.
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“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
And so Wordsworth's wondrous words flowed and flowed. The output was prodigious, and sometimes... the quality was sublime. Witness "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey."
On the other hand...
It's reported that in 1818, John Keats dined with William and Mary Wordsworth. When Keats tries to make a point about poetry, Mary whispered to the poet of lesser fame (at the time), “Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted” -
I won't even pretend that I understood everything written. No matter how many times I read some of them, the words just couldn't click in my mind. I wonder if it's because I'm reading poetry not in my native language or I'm just not that prepared to understand it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the poems about nature, I couldn't connect to the ones about the French revolution. Maybe one day I'll come revisit them, but this time with some guidance.
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Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth represents Wordsworth’s prolific output, from the poems first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that changed the face of English poetry to the late “Yarrow Revisited.” Wordsworth’s poetry is celebrated for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, the love of nature it expresses, and its representation of commonplace things and
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A couple of minor omissions I would’ve liked to see (Simon Lee, for example), but solid collection from one of the best poets ever. I especially like that this includes a healthy selection of The Prelude.
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After skimming through his poetry for 4 years, I've finally read it all the way through. His worship of nature I think should inspire anyone who feels a need to reconnect with God/Nature. The universe spoke through him and his words still vibrate today.
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Read this for my club, actually just an assortment of his poetry. I love nature, so I enjoyed his perspective. My favorite was " I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud"
"And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."
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Touching, Timeless & Beautiful! One Of The Greatest Poets!
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primal sympathies--
wordsworth's castrated submission to nature is full of beautiful longing and sadnesses. mournful womanliness inheriting the world in a golden twilight, sun on the hills... -
Review of selected poems:
https://withfreedomandbooks.blogspot.... -
Like several other romantic poets, William Wordsworth is a paradox. He aimed to celebrate the changeless things in nature and man. Yet, he writes with a strange boldness and originality that are bracing or unsettling depending upon how willingly we accept a new kind of poetry.
If Wordsworth no longer startles moderns, it is because so many later poets have made his strategies familiar, especially his habit of philosophizing from natural emblems. Wordsworth embarked on his most creative period by trying to chasten and chastize 18C poetry, using a language of limpid, plate-glass purity freed from mannered artifice. Yet his own manner was so distinctive that he is among the most parodied poets.
Wordsworth was born in Northwest England, the scenic Lake District he was to make famous. His mother died when he was 8 and his father died when he was 13, confirming what I believe is the profound effect on the sensitivity and imagination of children who are made vulnerable by the death of a parent. In his lifetime (1770-1850), despite the fact that he had not published, Wordsworth was considered, along with Byron, one of the two pivotal figures of English romanticism, Wordsworth once defied the imagination, which he considered the highest faculty of the creative mind, as something which "produces impressive effects out of simple elements."
After spending time in the Alps and upon seeing London which he found a phantasmagoria and, the antithesis of the stable grandeur and dignity of his native hills, Wordsworth spent his life as a bachelor (after fathering a child with a Frenchwoman whom) Wordsworth and his beloved sister Dorothy moved in together, and she helped restore his mental health and remained with him to old age.
The friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge became one of the most fruitful in literary history. They conceived together both a new poetic style and a whole new rationale of what poetry should do. Poetry was to be an agency not of mere diversion but of profound truth in an imaginative union that would spiritually enlighten and heal. Wordsworth treated everyday subjects the medium would be an honest language really spoken by men, cleansed of unfunctional conventionality. Oddly, one of the things that obscures the purpose in many of Wordsworth poems is the very simplicity of the language; one of the hardest things in reading his works is to concentrate on the behavior of words that seem not to be doing anything special at all.
The typical movement of Wordsworth's major works is the oscillation: between observation of the external scene and introspective analysis of feelings; between experiences and ideas they generate; between the remembered past and present circumstances; between a personal confession ("I") and universal truths ("we"). We need to keep this back-and-forth movement in mind when we call Wordsworth a nature poet. Though it is everywhere in his work, nature rarely appears simply for its own sake. Rather nature is a mythic emblem-of a mysterious, perhaps divine presence, of a dynamic of steady order in the universe, and especially of the development and experience of individuals.
Moreover, nature can cut two ways. It is beauty. It is fear. Wordsworth is a poet of joy but also of the deepest anxiety. Wordsworth's subject is not ultimately nature but the psyche. Wordsworth substitutes imagination for religion for nature is Wordsworth's epic, the providential force leading him by dark ways to heroism which is the development of imaginative-truly human- power. -
William Wordsworth my favourite poet once wrote ‘of beauty felt along the heart’
Like waves beating along the shore.
“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
William Wordsworth
Great poems make us more human. They introduce us to new ways of seeing the world.
May is a great month everything is lighter and brighter after the long winter.
I feel it’s time to start looking for my precious shells again and spend time watching the ocean talk to me like the ebb and flow of a voice.
All the mysteries the ocean holds. Maybe one day the ocean will tell us all it’s secrets, but for now I’ll keep on writing down what I think it says to me.
I’ll post some pictures of my walk later on stories.
What aspect of nature do you love the most?
The beaches
The Trees
The Ocean
The Wind and the Breeze
The Birds busy chattering
The Sunshine smiling so happily down on us
The Moon so full of wisdom and wonder..
Tell me what secrets of nature do you want to hear?
