10
votes
Accepted
How does the editor know that seven lines are missing from Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere?
TL;DR: Line numbers in the margin of manuscript A indicate that the missing page 9r in manuscript B had 24 lines, of which 17 can be restored from manuscript A, meaning that 7 are missing.
Manuscript ...
- 53.5k
7
votes
Accepted
What does the line "The echoes of your rocks my carols wild" mean?
"The echoes of your rocks" is an indirect object, and "my carols wild" is a direct object.
That's the only way I can make sense of this sentence. The words "a happy child" are a descriptive comment ...
- 71.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Meaning of "not to say this is a bad kind of poetry" etc. in Wordsworth's Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"
Perhaps changing which words are bolded and italicizing other words will help:
The proper method of treating trivial and simple verses to which Dr. Johnson's stanza would be a fair parallelism is not ...
- 22.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Meaning of "I'm almost three-score" in "The Idiot Boy" by Wordsworth
Betty Foy's son, the "idiot boy", is not a boy in the conventional sense ("a young male"). Betty Foy uses the term probably in the second sense provided by Wiktionary:
(diminutive) A male child: a ...
- 44k
4
votes
What's the meaning of "my censures" as in Coleridge's “Biographia Literaria”
Neither. Coleridge is referring to his own reservations about some of Wordsworth's poems. The context makes this clear:
A friend whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and ...
- 22.1k
4
votes
Is it valid to say "Boat Stealing" by Wordsworth has a sense of foreboding in the section up to line 25?
After line 25, the poem turns dark and troubled, as
the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measured motion, like a living ...
- 406
3
votes
Theme of William Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven"?
this poem depicts the innocent nature of a child who just does not want to understand that her siblings have passed away of natural causes and continuously reiterating her determined claim that they ...
- 406
3
votes
Meaning of "dim blue match" in "The Female Vagrant" by Wordsworth
The match can’t be a friction match as these were not invented until 1826, long after the publication of ‘The Female Vagrant’ in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Instead, the blue flame ...
- 53.5k
3
votes
Accepted
Meaning of "dim blue match" in "The Female Vagrant" by Wordsworth
That would be my understanding, yes. Either because of wind the match is burning weakly or because a flame is coloured according to what is burning, so there might have been 19th century matches that ...
- 472
2
votes
How can pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind?
There's plenty of ways how a pleasant thought can bring sad thoughts to mind but in this context, Wordsworth is grieving the condition of humanity.
As the proceeding lines below state,
To her fair ...
- 2,216
2
votes
What does “inward eye” mean?
The meaning of "inward eye" is suggested by the other lines: when the poet is lying on his couch, alone, and begins to daydream, the daffodils become visible again in his imagination. In a ...
- 44k
2
votes
Looking for a famous quote by William Wordsworth probably relevant to the concept of the Anthropocene
One possibility is the line "Little we see in Nature that is ours" from Wordsworth's sonnet "The world is too much with us". The poem reads as follows:
The world is too much with ...
- 22.1k
2
votes
What does Wordsworth mean by "A pagan suckled in a creed outworn"?
TL;DR: The speaker does not actually want to be a pagan.
In this sonnet, the octave describes the spiritual inadequacy of modern life, and the sestet describes a more attractive but still untenable ...
- 53.5k
2
votes
Accepted
The text of Wordsworth's "To Toussaint L'Ouverture"
I found four versions of these lines published by Wordsworth in his lifetime. We can be reasonably confident that these are the poet’s own revisions.
Toussaint! the most unhappy Man of Men,
Whether ...
- 53.5k
1
vote
"Chieftain" and Toussaint's ethnicity in Wordsworth's "To Toussaint L'Ouverture"
Toussaint was born as an enslaved person on Saint-Domingue, but rose to become its Governor General.
My reading is that Kaplan thinks it unlikely that Wordsworth would have referred to a white ...
- 18.6k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible