CHAPTER 6.

THE LYRICAL BALLADS.

Although Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction had a sounder basis in literary tradition and in psychology than an ignorant world of letters was prepared to admit, his own application of it, in its first extreme form, was very limited in time and in extent. Only in the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 does he say that he means to employ the 'language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society'; and only in this volume does he actually succeed in doing so. But even here he makes use of this language simply as an 'experiment,' and clearly indicates that the experiment applies only to a part-though a major part of the collection.

The poems composing the minority, not included under Wordsworth's definition of his purpose, are easily determined. Apart from the contributions of Coleridge, and apart from Tintern Abbey, which, as Wordsworth himself indicates, was composed in the loftier and more impassioned strain of the ode,1 they prove to be the poems written before 1797—the Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, The Female Vagrant, the Lines written near Richmond, and the Convict-none of which show any trace of the ballad-literature. One other poem in the volume shows virtually nothing of this influence. This is the Old Man Travelling, which occupies a unique place in the first edition. It is the only representative of a type of delineation of rustic life in blank verse which developed side by side with the Lyrical Ballads, but which does not otherwise appear in print till the volumes of 1800. The remaining poems in the first edition form a homogeneous group, clearly reflecting the

1

See note on Tintern Abbey in the Lyrical Ballads, 1802-1805, reprinted by Hutchinson in the Oxford edition, p. 901.

literary influence suggested in the title, and the theory of poetic diction suggested in the Advertisement. They are the real experiment-the attempt to co-ordinate the artless art of the ballads with Wordsworth's own observation of the psychological processes underlying the speech of simple men; the rest are merely poems written in various moods and in various styles.

This group of the true Lyrical Ballads falls into four main divisions:

I. Philosophical and narrative poems in the metre, and, to a certain extent, the style of the ballads, but wholly differing from them in substance.

2.

(a) Philosophical and reflective poems, in which the narrative element is at a minimum:

Lines written in Early Spring

Lines written at a Small Distance from my House
Expostulation and Reply

The Tables Turned.

(b) Narrative poems in the nature of simple anecdotes designed to illustrate a philosophical truth that is far less simple:

We are Seven

Anecdote for Fathers

Simon Lee.

Narrative and lyrical poems, less recondite in thought, but written in a 'more impressive metre than is usual in the Ballads'1:

(a) Poems more narrative than lyrical:

Goody Blake and Harry Gill

The Idiot Boy

(Peter Bell).

(b) Poems in which the lyrical element tends to pre

1 Preface, 1800, p. xxxv.

dominate, or does wholly predominate (characterized

by the use of the refrain):

The Thorn

The Last of the Flock

The Mad Mother

The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman.

The last group most obviously illustrate Wordsworth's suggested definition of a lyrical ballad, as a narrative poem in which the 'feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling," though this description applies to all the

poems.

In these several groups of poems, there are some distinct peculiarities of language which are directly traceable to the combined influence of the Reliques and the speech of rustics, and which, for better or for worse, had a far-reaching influence upon Wordsworth's poetic diction.

As we have already said, by language Wordsworth apparently meant, not vocabulary alone, but the whole body and dress of thought—all that appears to the eye and ear when (if we may say this without irreverence) the word becomes flesh, and takes its place among things that have a material, as well as a spiritual existence. But the unit of expression, for all practical purposes, is generally the individual term— words, in the usual sense; and hence any influence affecting language does first of all affect the vocabulary. Accordingly, we will begin with the vocabulary of these Lyrical Ballads, and proceed thence to the more important matters of syntax, and of narrative and lyrical technique.

I. Vocabulary.

At first glance, the vocabulary of the Lyrical Ballads does not seem to be notable. Apart from a number of colloquial expressions, it is a pure, clear vocabulary of con

crete words, neither more nor less simple than the language of the majority of poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse. But when we examine it in the light of the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, even this fact becomes interesting.

As has already been said, the two poets had some notion that there was a permanent body of English words-the names of common things and universal emotions—which had remained comparatively unaltered since the days of Chaucer. This was the generally intelligible language of poetry which the eighteenth century had always endeavored to discover a language 'simple, sensuous, and passionate.' This contention is fully justified by the Lyrical Ballads. Although Wordsworth's avowed effort is to imitate the language that he daily hears on the lips of unlearned men, stanza after stanza of the most typical Wordsworthian verse in this volume contain only words that may be found in Skeat's glossary to Chaucer. This is true, for instance, of the description of the little cottage girl:

I met a little cottage girl,

She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl1
That clustered round her head,'

and of the wonderful lines-quam nihil ad genium naucleri' which Hutchinson chooses as the supreme example of a case in which the 'lineaments of the poet peep out through his clumsy disguise'3:

At all times of the day or night

This wretched woman thither goes,
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows.*

1Occurs in Chaucer's poetry as crul, crulle, meaning curly.

We are Seven 5-8.

Even when the poet is writing more philosophically, he still seems to find the vocabulary of Chaucer not inadequate. In the stanza,

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
-We murder to dissect,1

only the word 'dissect' is entirely unknown to his master. Of course there are many cases in which this is not so. Rustics in the line, 'She had a rustic woodland air,' and intermitted in the line, 'And held such intermitted talk,' are not Chaucerian. The remarkable thing is that he should have come so near the vocabulary of the 'first finder of our fair language,' when he was writing in accordance with a theory in which the imitation of Chaucer was merely an incidental suggestion by Coleridge. It is certainly a proof of the essential soundness of this new conception of the universal language of poetry that, after so many centuries, some of the most characteristic expressions of an imagination so individual as that of Wordsworth should be strictly in the vocabulary of Chaucer."

While this attempt to find the really permanent element in the English language was undoubtedly the most valuable

2 The earliest occurrence of this word noted in the N. E. D. is in Topsell, Serpents 621 (1607).

3

The earliest occurrence of this word noted in the N. E. D. is in Palladadius On Husbandry 1. 1027 (c. 1440).

4

The earliest occurrence of the word in this sense noted in the N. E. D. is in Wyatt, Death of the Countess Pembroke 421-422 (1542).

"Of the words in the Concordance to the poems of Wordsworth, I estimate that about 60 per cent occur, in some form, in the poetry of Chaucer; about 68 per cent. in the poetry of Milton; about 80 per cent in the poetry of Spenser; and 90 per cent in the poetry of Shakespeare.