Poems, in Two Volumes

Summary

Poems, in Two Volumes, published by Longman in April 1807, is the collection in which William Wordsworth gathered the shorter poems of his greatest decade, written mostly between 1802 and 1807 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Many readers consider it his finest single book. The first volume opens with short lyrics such as To the Daisy and the Character of the Happy Warrior, and includes the Ode to Duty, in which the poet, once content to follow impulse, asks the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God for a steadier law. It also contains Poems Composed during a Tour, Chiefly on Foot, and a series of sonnets, among them Composed upon Westminster Bridge, the sonnet beginning It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The world is too much with us, with its complaint that getting and spending we lay waste our powers, and London, 1802, which begins Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour. These political sonnets, written during and after the Peace of Amiens, call England back to the moral strength of its seventeenth-century poets and patriots. The second volume includes poems from a tour of Scotland, notably The Solitary Reaper, about a Highland girl singing as she works in the field, and a group called Moods of My Own Mind, containing My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky, To the Cuckoo and I wandered lonely as a cloud. The book closes with the Ode later titled Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, a great meditation on the fading of the visionary gleam of childhood, in which our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting and we come trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home. The volume was harshly reviewed, especially by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, who mocked its simplicity, but its sonnets and lyrics are now among the most widely taught poems in English. For students it shows Wordsworth at his most varied: patriotic, devotional, playful and profound.

Top Lessons

• Nature and the soul

  Wordsworth finds in daffodils, rainbows and a singing girl a joy that nourishes the inner life.

• The world too much with us

  The sonnet warns that getting and spending dulls our hearts to wonder.

• Childhood and immortality

  The Ode says we come from God trailing clouds of glory, and the light fades as we grow.

Verified Quotes