The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth

No brother, no mate1 has he near him-while I
Can draw warmth from the cheek of my Love;
As blest and as glad, in this desolate gloom,

As if green summer grass were the floor of my room,
And woodbines were hanging above.

Yet, God is my witness, thou small helpless Thing!
Thy life I would gladly sustain

Till summer come 2 up from the south, and with crowds Of thy brethren a march thou should'st sound through the clouds.

And back to the forests again!

A POET'S EPITAPH

Composed 1799.-Published 1800

One of the "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection."-Ed.

ART thou a Statist 3 in the van

Of public conflicts 4 trained and bred?
-First learn to love one living man;
Then may'st thou think upon the dead.
A Lawyer art thou ?-draw not nigh!
Go, carry to some fitter place
The keenness of that practised eye,
The hardness of that sallow face.5

1 1827.

no Friend

1800.

No brother has he, no companion, while I

MS.

2 1837.

Art thou a Man of purple cheer?
A rosy Man, right plump to see?
Approach; yet, Doctor,* not too near,
This grave no cushion is for thee.

Or art thou one of gallant pride,1
A Soldier and no man of chaff?
Welcome !-but lay thy sword aside,
And lean upon a peasant's staff.

Physician art thou ?—one, all eyes,
Philosopher!-a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave?

Wrapt closely in thy sensual fleece,
O turn aside,—and take, I pray,
That he below may rest in peace,
Thy ever-dwindling soul, away! 2

A Moralist perchance appears;

Led, Heaven knows how! to this poor sod:
And he has neither eyes nor ears;
Himself his world, and his own God;

One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling

Nor form, nor feeling, great or 3 small;
A reasoning, self-sufficing 4 thing,

The edition of 1815 returns to the text of 1800.

* D.D., not M.D. The physician is referred to in the fifth stanza.—ED.

Shut close the door; press down the latch;
Sleep in thy intellectual crust;

Nor lose ten tickings of thy watch

Near this unprofitable dust.

But who is He, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown? *
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.

He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove ;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed ;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie

The harvest of a quiet eye

Some random truths he can impart,—

That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

But he is weak; both Man and Boy,
Hath been an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.

-Come hither in thy hour of strength;
Come, weak as is a breaking wave!
Here stretch thy body at full length ;
Or build thy house upon this grave.

Compare Thomson's description of the Bard, in his Castle of Indolence

(canto ii., stanza xxxiii.)—

He came, the bard, a little Druid wight,
Of withered aspect; but his eye was keen,

With sweetness mixed. In russet brown bedight,
He crept along, etc.

ED.

See the Fenwick note to the poem, Written in Germany, on one of the coldest Days of the Century (p. 73). "The Poet's Epitaph is disfigured to my taste by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of pin-point," in the sixth stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. (Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, January 1801.)—ED.