William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born on April 17, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. He was a British poet, crediting with ushering in the English Romantic Movement along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The magnificent landscape of the Lake District deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father.

With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school
and continued his studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine . He entered St. John's College, Cambridge and received a bacherlor's degree in 1791.

Wordsworth traveled twice to France and met a girl whom he had an affair with. They had an illegitimate daughter Anne Caroline. The affair was basis of the poem "Vaudracour and Julia."

In 1795 he met Coleridge. Wordsworth's financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy. Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed his first masterwork,
Lyrical Ballads, which opened with
Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude.

In 1802, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. In later life Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative man.

In 1843 he was named England's poet laureate. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850.

Lucy Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known

Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"

 

The Sun Has Long Been Set

The sun has long been set,
The stars are out by twos and threes,
The little birds are piping yet
Among the bushes and the trees;
There's a cuckoo, and one or two thrushes,
And a far-off wind that rushes,
And a sound of water that gushes,
And the cuckoo's sovereign cry
Fills all the hollow of the sky.
Who would go `parading'
In London, `and masquerading',
On such a night of June
With that beautiful soft half-moon,
And all these innocent blisses?
On such a night as this is!

"Faith is a passionate intuition."

William Wordsworth