In "The Nightingale" Wordsworth first called that bird "a creature of a
fiery heart"; but in the edition of 1815 it became "a creature of
ebullient heart," a flat disenchantment of the verse. The change was
questioned from the first, as Crabb Robinson tells us, and in later
editions the first reading was restored. A fortunate correction made in
the same edition was retained--the change of "laughing company" to
"jocund company," in "The Daffodils":
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company.
--1815.
The poem "Rural Architecture," in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, was
curtailed of its closing stanza in the edition of 1815:
Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works
In Paris and London, 'mong Christians and Turks,
Spirits busy to do and undo, etc., etc.
But in Lamb's correspondence of the same year he complains to Wordsworth
that the omission "leaves it [the poem] in my mind less complete," and
the lines were restored in the later editions. Not to differ hastily
with Lamb, the lines yet seem lines to be spared. In the same sentence
he complains that in the new edition there is another "admirable line
gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat, and the
glancing sandpiper,' which was a line quite alive. I demand these at
your hand." Wordsworth restored the line, and the three versions of the
passage are worth comparison. It is from the "Lines left upon a Seat in
a Yew Tree," and describes a wanderer in the solitude of the country:
His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper:
And on these barren rocks, with juniper,
And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er,
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished.
--"Lyrical Ballads."
In the second reading he corrects a bad assonance thus:
His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless bird,
Piping along the margin of the lake....
--1815.
Here the "line quite alive" is gone--to be restored in deference,
apparently, to Lamb's request. Another assonance is got rid of in the
later editions, the "thistle thinly sprinkled o'er," and the passage now
reads melodiously as follows:
His only visitants a straggling sheep.
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper:
And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath,
And juniper and thistle, sprinkled o'er,
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished.
Wordsworth struck out many lines and stanzas in the course of his
revisions, besides main passages of considerable length, as from the
"Thanksgiving Ode" and the patriotic ode of January, 1816. These
omissions are too long to quote here; but the following lines dropped
from the ode on "Immortality" will have interest; they are not to be
found, I think, in any English edition since that of 1815. Addressing
the child over whom Immortality, in the language of the ode,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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