![]() The second line - "I turned to share the transport – Oh! With whom" - pushes onward to its apostrophe, deferred until the last possible moment – "With whom/ but thee …" The lines rise to a crescendo, and "thee", addressing the child no longer there, is the word with which they peak. And, of course, the "I" is unimportant, relatively. The opening line is much quoted, and wonderfully, strikingly original: "Surprised by joy – impatient as the wind." Those two adjectival clauses, separated by a dash – or, rather, a delicious gasp - instantly focus attention on the sensations rather than the subject, "I". This week's choice is the sonnet written in the aftermath of the death of his three-year-old daughter, Catherine. The tone is intimate, but not as intimate as a "glow-worm lamp". There is a certain grandeur about many of them, but it's a grandeur in carpet-slippers, natural and uninhibited. How does his own work fit into the tradition? Milton's sonnets were a major influence on him, but Wordsworth writes neither the Miltonic sonnet of "soul-animating strains" nor "the glow-worm lamp" that "cheered mild Spenser", but a kind of combination. In a poem addressed to the frowning "critic", Scorn Not the Sonnet, we learn some of Wordsworth's own opinions about the form and its practitioners. They ask to be heard, or overheard, because they seem to speak. ![]() But they are dramatic - almost, at times, in a Shakespearean way (that of the plays rather than the sonnets). The sonnets achieve this: their rhetoric, for the period, is naturalistic, their figures rarely complex. Wordsworth's poetic goal, expressed in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, was to use direct, natural diction close to that of ordinary speech. Whether or not they have an identified addressee, they seem to require a listener. Wordsworth's sonnets are disclosures of intense emotion.
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