Most literary histories of the
time will tell you:
Wordsworth’s talent died forty
years before him
But only lately have the details
of its last days
Begun to emerge. Dorothy
Wordsworth wrote
A detailed letter to Coleridge
which was found
In the summer of 2006 by a scholar
cataloging
Coleridge’s opium visions who
found a dream
Which had gone unread since it was
deposited,
Mislabelled, in the Bodleian. In a
wavering hand
(Yes, Dorothy drank; what of it?)
the letter relates that
Late in the troubled year of 1810,
Wordsworth
Had gone off on one of his
compulsive walks
His long legs scissoring 40 miles
or more a day
His talent, which had always a
weak chest,
Could not keep up. It turned back,
knocking
At the door just as dusk was
gathering its forces
And the night birds were taking up
their posts.
It was feverish and almost
delirious speaking sometimes
In the German which Wordsworth had
failed to master.
As far as she could tell, Dorothy
said, it thought
It had offended the North Star der
Nordstern;
And begged her to apologize for
him. She and Anne Vincy
(Sometimes spelled Vincey), her
maid, put it to bed
But later moved it to Thompson’s
Castle of Indolence
Which was almost unvisited then;
the National Trust
Would not refurbish it and open it
to visitors
For a century and a half. They
built a fire; a country doctor
Bled it and purged it but warned
them against hope.
On the third night, with Dorothy
dozing in a chair,
It sat bold upright and cried out
in a loud voice
Words Dorothy tried later to
remember but could not.
It sank back dead. It’s body has
not been found;
It is presumed the two women,
perhaps with the doctor,
Arranged a private burial in the
castle’s boneyard.
When he came back from his tour
the women
Told Wordsworth nothing of their
failed efforts.
More, they did their best to make
him think
His talent lived still. They would
tell him
They’d seen it watching the sun
set over the water
Or making a clumsy drawing of a
cat. In time
He stopped asking about it.
