by the lofty springs of Glenderamakin-that Wordsworth refers in the lines, Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. He was at Flodden in 1513, when nearly sixty years of age, leading there the "flower of Craven." From Penigent to Pendle Hill, From Linton to long Addingham, And all that Craven's coasts did till, They with the lusty Clifford came. Compare, in the first canto of The White Doe of Rylstone (p. 117) when he, with spear and shield, Rode full of years to Flodden-field. He died in 1523, and was buried in the choir of Bolton Priory. The following is Sarah Coleridge's criticism of the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, in the editorial note to her father's Biographia Literaria (vol. ii. ch. ix. p. 152, ed. 1847): "The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble lyric I have always thought rendered it one of the finest specimens of modern subjective poetry which our age has seen. The ode commences in a tone of high gratulation and festivity-a tone not only glad, but comparatively even jocund and light-hearted. The Clifford is restored to the home, the honours and estates of his ancestors. Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of tribulation -times of war and bloodshed, flight and terror, and hiding away from the enemy-times of poverty and distress, when the Clifford was brought, a little child, to the shelter of a northern valley. After a while it emerges from those depths of sorrow-gradually rises into a strain of elevated tranquillity and contemplative rapture; through the power of imagination, the beautiful and impressive aspects of nature are brought into relationship with the spirit of him, whose fortunes and character form the subject of the piece, and are represented as gladdening and exalting it, whilst they keep it pure and unspotted from the world. Suddenly the Poet is carried on with greater animation and passion: he has returned to the point whence he started-flung himself back into the tide of stirring VOL. IV H life and moving events. All is to come over again, struggle and conflict, chances and changes of war, victory and triumph, overthrow and desolation. I know nothing, in lyric poetry, more beautiful or affecting than the final transition from this part of the ode, with its rapid metre, to the slow elegiac stanzas at the end, when, from the warlike fervour and eagerness, the jubilant strain which has just been described, the Poet passes back into the sublime silence of Nature, gathering amid her deep and quiet bosom a more subdued and solemn tenderness than he had manifested before; it is as if from the heights of the imaginative intellect, his spirit had retreated into the recesses of a profoundly thoughtful Christian heart." Professor Henry Reed said of this poem-"Had he never written another ode, this alone would set him at the head of the lyric poets of England."----ED. 1808 THE poems referring to Coleorton are all transferred to the year 1807, and The Force of Prayer was written in that year. Those composed in 1808 were few in number. With the exception of The White Doe of Rylstone-to which additions were made in that year - they include only the two sonnets Composed while the Author was engaged in writing a Tract, occasioned by the Convention of Cintra, and the fragment on George and Sarah Green. The latter poem Wordsworth gave to De Quincey, who published it in his "Recollections of Grasmere," which appeared in Taiť's Edinburgh Magazine in September 1839; but it never found a place in any edition of Wordsworth's own poems. In this edition it is printed in the appendix to volume viii. The reasons which have led me to assign The White Doe of Rylstone to the year 1808, are stated in a note to the poem (see p. 191). I infer that it was practically finished in April 1808, because Dorothy Wordsworth, in a letter to Lady Beaumont, dated April 20, 1808, says, "The poem is to be published. Longman has consented in spite of the odium under which my brother labours as a poet-to give him 100 guineas for 1000 copies, according to his demand." She gives no indication of the name of the poem referred to. As it must, however, have been one which was to be published separately, she can only refer to The White Doe or to The Excursion ; but the latter poem was not finished in 1808. It is probable, from the remark made in a subsequent letter to Lady Beaumont, February 1810, that Wordsworth intended either to add to what he had written in 1808, or to alter some passages before publication; or by "completing" the poem, he may have meant simply adding the Dedication, which was not written till 1815. All things considered, it seems the best arrangement that the poems of 1808 should begin with The White Doe of Rylstone. In the year 1891 I edited this poem for the Clarendon Press. A few additional details have come to light since then, and are introduced into the notes. S. T. Coleridge's criticism of the poem in Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. chap. xxii. p. 176 (edition 1817), should be consulted. -ED. THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE ; Composed 1807-10. -Published 1815 ADVERTISEMENT DURING the Summer of 1807, I visited, for the first time, the beautiful country that surrounds Bolton Priory, in Yorkshire ; and the Poem of the WHITE DOE, founded upon a Tradition connected with that place, was composed at the close of the same year.-W. W.* [The earlier half of this poem was composed at Stocktonupon-Tees, when Mrs. Wordsworth and I were on a visit to her eldest brother, Mr. Hutchinson, at the close of the year 1807. The country is flat, and the weather was rough. I was accustomed every day to walk to and fro under the shelter of a row of stacks, in a field at a small distance from the town, and there poured forth my verses aloud as freely as they would come. Mrs. Wordsworth reminds me that her brother stood upon the punctilio of not sitting down to dinner till I joined the party; and it frequently happened that I did not make my appearance till too late, so that she was made uncomfortable. I here beg her pardon for this and similar transgressions during the whole course of our wedded life. To my beloved sister the same apology is due. * This is the final form of the "Advertisement" to The White Doe of Rylstone. The variations from it, which occur in earlier editions, from 1815 onwards, need not be noted. The poem was placed in the 1820 edition in volume iii., in 1827 in volume iv., in 1832 in volume iii., and in 1836-37 and afterwards in volume iv. of the Collected Works.-ED. When, from the visit just mentioned, we returned to Townend, Grasmere, I proceeded with the poem; and it may be worth while to note, as a caution to others who may cast their eye on these memoranda, that the skin having been rubbed off my heel by my wearing too tight a shoe, though I desisted from walking, I found that the irritation of the wounded part was kept up, by the act of composition, to a degree that made it necessary to give my constitution a holiday. A rapid cure was the consequence. Poetic excitement, when accompanied by protracted labour in composition, has throughout my life brought on more or less bodily derangement. Nevertheless, I am at the close of my seventy-third year, in what may be called excellent health; so that intellectual labour is not necessarily unfavourable to longevity. But perhaps I ought here to add that mine has been generally carried on out of doors. Let me here say a few words of this poem in the way of criticism. The subject being taken from feudal times has led to its being compared to some of Walter Scott's poems that belong to the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I have attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted by the principal personages in The White Doe fails, so far as its object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual it succeeds. The heroine of the poem knows that her duty is not to interfere with the current of events, either to forward or delay them, but to abide This she does in obedience to her brother's injunction, as most suitable to a mind and character that, under previous trials, has been proved to accord with his. She achieves this not without aid from the communication with the inferior Creature, which often leads her thoughts to revolve upon the past with a tender and humanising influence that exalts rather than depresses her. The anticipated beatification, if I may so say, of her mind, and the apotheosis of the companion of her solitude, are the points at which the Poem aims, and constitute its legitimate catastrophe, far too spiritual a one for instant or widely-spread |