Variants On The Text

[Variant 1:

1836.

... Ye leaves, When will that dying murmur be suppress'd? Your sound my heart of peace bereaves, It robs my heart of rest. 1800.]

[Variant 2:

1800.

... yon ... MS.]

[Variant 3:

1836.

Thou Eglantine whose arch so proudly towers (Even like a rainbow ... 1800.

... the rainbow ... 1802.

The text of 1815 returns to that of 1800.]

[Variant 4:

1836.

... or ... 1800.]

If the second, third, and fourth stanzas of this poem had been published without the first, the fifth, and the last, it would have been deemed an exquisite fragment by those who object to the explanatory preamble, and to the moralising sequel. The intermediate stanzas suggest Burns's

'Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair! How can ye chant, ye little birds, An' I sae weary, fu' o' care!'

and Browning's 'May and Death':

'I wish that when you died last May, Charles, there had died along with you Three parts of spring's delightful things; Ay, and, for me, the fourth part too.'

This mood of mind Wordsworth appreciated as fully as the opposite, or complementary one, which finds expression in the great 'Ode, Intimations of Immortality' (vol. viii.), l. 26.

'No more shall grief of mine the season wrong,'

and which Browning expresses in other verses of his lyric, and repeatedly elsewhere. The allusion in the last stanza of this poem is to Wordsworth's sister Dorothy.--Ed.

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