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To Wordsworth
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.
Shelley’s genre in To Wordsworth has been described as the “corrective tribute”. The euphemism seems to let Shelley off lightly. There’s little doubt that the younger poet intended a combination more abrasive than gently “improving”. The sonnet was published in his 1816 collection, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, in which one of the themes is an idealistic young Romantic poet’s narrative of political disillusion.
Shelley’s technique is artful. The opening address to Wordsworth has a tone of gentle lament, in which the younger poet sees himself and his addressee as sharers of life’s ordinary sorrows and losses, the “common woes”. His quiet affirmation of solidarity is, however, a preparation for stronger censure to follow, and soon we see the place where the weapon is unsheathed: “These common woes I feel. One loss is mine, / Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.” The stop after “I feel” marks the severance. Shelley sees the lost intensity of their once-shared political idealism. All his disillusionment with Wordsworth centres in the verb “deplore”. It describes Shelley’s strength of young feeling, unique and merciless.
The particularly cruel insight (if true) is that Wordsworth’s resigns his power with less suffering than Shelley experiences, observing his resignation. The loss is far more sharply registered by Wordsworth’s once-admiring younger friend – according to his friend’s account. It may be his true response, and a cruel judgment: it isn’t exactly a usable “corrective”.
The “frail bark” and “rock-like refuge” Wordsworth has presented in young Shelley’s view are somewhat conventional metaphors, and seem rather shallowly connected to the work and the life. However, Shelley raises his game. He finds a special decorum in a last longing image of Wordsworth in all his moral presence: “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.” Shelley would have been thinking of the more politically radical sonnets by Wordsworth such as To Toussaint Louverture and possibly the despairing The World Is Too Much With Us. Wordsworth’s nature poems were also important to Shelley, and furthered the democratic vision.
What the younger visionary proclaims ultimately is the imaginative and moral death of the older poet. It’s a chilling verdict, and the truth of it is not proven: we learn much more of what Shelley felt about Wordsworth than any details concerning the finer points of the failure and complacency he believed Wordsworth to have exemplified. Wordsworth was still some years from the pinnacle of success, respectability and poet laureateship, and the various charges of loss of inspiration other poets would later press. To Wordsworth remains effective in the slowly mustered forces of its sincerity and regret, and the emotional charge of the disappointment. “Deserting” his own songs (like a leader abandoning his troops) Wordsworth has left Shelley to grieve, “Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.” Shelley has in fact come to bury a poet he believes is already creatively, politically, dead on the battlefield of ideas.
