Yarrow poems (Wordsworth)

[5]In August 1803 William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy set out on a tour of Scotland, initially with their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though they left him behind after two weeks.

[6] On 18 September, in the return half of their journey, they walked from Peebles to Clovenfords, deciding to avoid the Yarrow not for the reasons stated in the poem but simply because they were short of time.

[15] Its theme is his belief, confirmed by his travels of the previous few years, in the superiority of unvisited scenes to visited ones as a spur to the imagination;[16] as R. H. Hutton wrote, "He hoarded his joys and lived upon the interest which they paid in the form of hope and expectation.

"[17] But the poem's scenery was determined by his wish to draw a picture of all the aspects of the Border Scott loved,[18] for it was written, Wordsworth told his new friend, "not without a view of pleasing you".

The Edinburgh Review called it "a very tedious and affected performance",[20] while Le Beau Monde, or, Literary and Fashionable Magazine said that Wordsworth "had long protracted [it] for the pleasure of concluding it with a nothing".

"[26] Among modern critics, Hugh Sykes Davies considered that "the poem has slender merits";[27] but for Russell Hayes it was "a delightful piece of Border minstrelsy".

[42] He radically revised it, probably in late September or early October,[43] admitting to a friend that it was "heavier than my things generally are", and that a "falling off [from "Yarrow Unvisited"] was unavoidable, perhaps, from the subject, as imagination almost always transcends reality.

[45] The resulting work, Stephen Gill has written, "celebrates the actual beauty of the place while recognizing how much its power to move depends on literary associations and the mind's play".

[46] Again Wordsworth engages deeply with earlier local poems by Hamilton, Hogg and Robert Burns, and particularly with Logan's "The Braes of Yarrow" and Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel, even down to their rhymes and rhythms, making it "more lyric than ballad, more music than narrative, more sound than sense".

Kenneth R. Johnston considered it no more than "a tepid tribute of scene-painting",[16] but F. B. Pinion wrote that it is "exquisitely expressed throughout", and "one of several poems which show that Wordsworth in his later years was capable of writing in strains rarely surpassed by other English poets".

Suffering health problems of his own, Wordsworth delayed his departure and only reached Abbotsford, accompanied by his daughter Dora, on 19 September, five days before Scott was due to leave.

This day's journey was the occasion of two poems by Wordsworth, one a sonnet beginning "A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain",[57] and the other "Yarrow Revisited", written a few weeks later in October 1831.

[59] It was published in his collection, Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, initially in April 1835,[60] though new editions were needed in 1836 and 1839, this being the first of Wordsworth's books to meet with commercial success.

[61] Wordsworth was not finished with the subject of his memories of the Yarrow: he returned to it in passages of his "Extempore Effusions upon the Death of James Hogg" in 1835, and again in "Musings near Aquapendente" in 1837.

In America, it is true, The Christian Examiner and General Review judged that though the language was pure and flowing, "the structure of the verse does not correspond to the grave style of thought.

[69] Alexander Lamont, writing in The Sunday Magazine, acknowledged this biographical interest but found it greatly inferior to the two earlier Yarrow poems in poetic art.

[71] Mary Moorman, like Shairp, agreed with Wordsworth's own misgivings about the poem, while also being charmed by the picture it presented of two poets finding happiness for a few hours in spite of age and sickness.

[16] Stephen Gill flatly contradicted Wordsworth's remarks on "Yarrow Revisited": "It is the pressure of fact against the consolations of fancy which shapes the poet's meditation and makes it so poignant."