Abstract
As we have seen, the 1805 text of the passage describing the child bathing in the stream is an expansion of the original text, as follows: the child
stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian Plains, and from my Mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked Savage, in the thunder shower (I. 300–4).
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Notes and References
Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford, 1974) p. 13.
Wordsworth may have been influenced by Coleridge in this. See The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford, 1956–71) I. 354: ‘From my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c-my mind had been habituated to the Vast.’
Wordsworth’s reaction to this death may be compared with Clare’s fainting fits, ‘the cause of which, I always imagined, came from seeing-when I was younger — a man named Thomas Drake, after he had fell off a load of hay and broke his neck. The ghastly paleness of death struck such a terror on me that I could not forget it for years, and my dreams was constantly wanderings in churchyards, digging graves, seeing spirits in charnel houses, &c., &c.’ (Sketches in the Life of John Clare, written by Himself, ed. Edmund Blunden (London, 1931) p. 70.
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© 1982 J. R. Watson
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Watson, J.R. (1982). The Growth of Tenderness. In: Wordsworth’s Vital Soul. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05911-9_11
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