—I’m reading Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Doroth Wordsworth, which I heard about over at Tales From the Reading Room. Oh my goodness.

It’s a wonderful book that actually deserves it cover blurb by Oliver Sacks— “A beautiful, deep and humble study of incredibly complex people.” (Have you noticed how many times those blurbs don’t really relate to the text at all?)

Before I started Wilson’s book, I’d read William’s Prelude, (etc. etc.), and anthologized bits of Dorothy’s. The first bit of her journalling I ever read was the bit on daffodils from the Grasmere notebook. She took me by storm, I have to admit, whereas William’s ego always niggled at me. Now I know that he’s an amazing poet; there are scenes from his work that will always linger, but there is also an antisceptic quality, a kind of lack of intimacy with anyone and anything but William’s own eye that makes the whole project feel cut off from the heart. I’ve had huge arguments about this, so don’t start, but this sense of intimate disassociation I ascribe to the fully Romantic mind.

Here’s the bit I first read read of Dorothy’s in those anthologies.

Thursday 15th. It was a threatening misty morning—but mild. We set off after dinner from Eusemere. Mrs Clarkson went a short way with us but turned back. The wind was furious and we thought we must have returned. We first rested in the large Boat-house, then under a furze Bush opposite Mr Clarkson’s. Saw the plough going in the field. The wind seized our breath the Lake was rough. There was a Boat by itself floating in the middle of the Bay below Water Millock. We rested again in the Water Millock Lane. The hawthorns are black and green, the birches here and there greenish but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the Twigs. We got over into a field to avoid some cows—people working, a few primroses by the roadside, woodsorrel flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry yellow flower which Mrs C. calls pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea. Rain came on—we were wet when we reached Luffs but we called in. Luckily all was chearless and gloomy so we faced the storm—we must have been wet if we had waited—put on dry clothes at Dobson’s. I was very kindly treated by a young woman, the Landlady looked sour but it is her way. She gave us a goodish supper. Excellent ham and potatoes. We paid 7/ when we came away. William was sitting by a bright fire when I came downstairs. He soon made his way to the Library piled up in a corner of the window. He brought out a volume of Enfield’s Speaker, another miscellany, and an odd volume of Congreve’s plays. We had a glass of warm rum and water. We enjoyed ourselves and wished for Mary. It rained and blew when we went to bed. N.B. Deer in Gowbarrow park like skeletons.

Here’s what William made of his sister’s observations.

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Sure, it’s an amazing poem, but I still prefer Dorothy’s observations. But now that I’m reading Wilson’s book, what is there in her journals, and what isn’t, is making a much finer picture. I still like D better than W but they were both absoultely crackers (yes, deep and complex, but crackers).

Here’s the picture Wilson paints of the two of them moving along a road.

She (Dorothy) is so absorbed in William and his words that she has no sense of how comical these constitutionals appear to those who pass them by; William with what De Quincey described as his ‘cade’-like stride – ‘a cade being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion’ – that would edge his companions off the road, Dorothy with what De Quincey called her ‘unsexual’ gait, bent forward, hurried in her movemnts. “Mr Wordsworth went bumming and booing about’, one local recalled of Wordsworth’s muttering as he paced up and down the path, ‘and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let ‘em fall, and tak ‘em down, and put ‘em on paper for him.’

The task the book is accomplishing for me is to reconcile those facts of their lives—their brilliance and their foolishness.

More later.