ENGL200 Blog 2 – Critical: Dear William Wordsworth

BLOG 2: You are Dorothy Wordsworth. Tell your brother William why you think your own description of events seen together in the Lake District are superior to you brother’s rather obscure depictions of the same event. Give a couple of clear examples to prove your point.

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Dearest Brother,

At times like these, I often ask myself if your words perhaps deepen our experiences at the Lakes in ways my words never could. Perhaps my sentiments are straight-forward and direct as I intend for nobody to read them and yours carry secrets of both mind and soul. My life is recollected through my journals; I live in the quiet facts and events of past times. Rereading both our works–your poetry and my journals–I relive different versions of the same moment. Perhaps I am more objective, whilst you are introspective. I view my world in accordance with the collectiveness and connectivity of others. You recreate the experience from within your own consciousness.

As an example, I compare our encounter with the leech gatherer and consider his characterisation in our respective writings. With my journals, we imagine an impoverished vagabond, whereas your portrayal is one that makes us feel he is a reverential, godly presence. You need not explain why this old man is hunched over and sore, though I feel he deserves our remembrance in realism and clarity, and so I must outline his ailments and injuries. You celebrate this man, yet I cannot celebrate what I feel I must pity. To be frank, I feel similarly toward your poetry; I cherish your words, dear brother, though I cannot celebrate the beauty that is manifested from the pains of your mind.

I understand Resolution and Independence captures your own state of mind and know meeting this old traveller assisted in attaining your own peace and stability. Sometimes I feel my writings expound the elucidated sense of a perhaps stable and healthy mind. The anguish and major fluctuations within your mosaic of consciousness may be so overwhelmed with a pained interiority that you can only focus on internal traumas or epiphanies. However, perhaps my authentic capturing of this leech gatherer’s experiences can be argued as less philosophical and more humanised and forces humans to peer beyond their own framing of experiences and empathise for the real and pained moments of others. Whilst I attempt to verbalise the sociableness of our lives, you experience the internal and eternal: “In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude…” Your poem is timeless and placeless, whereas I describe the people, places, and times that I traverse. Paradoxically, I hope this logicality facilitates an emotional connectivity for my reader; though the chronological and logical sentiments might seem to initially estrange the readers in another time and place, I do think this worldbuilding does in essence make it easier to connect with my writings.

I recall my entry on the 4^th of May. I remember when you “went to bed nervous and jaded in the extreme”. The way you personify those daffodils in ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ with movement and energy; those flowers exist beyond the meaning of their words on the page. I can not only explicate the semantic meaning behind your poetry, but I also taste the meaning created in the form, rhyme and texture of your words. I lose myself in the fusion of our worlds, I see the sharpness of memory in my journals: “lake…wind…breeze…river…grass…hill”.  The multisyllabic and abstract essence of your words: “outstretched…thousand…sparkling…pensive…inward…solitude”; that is where I see the halo of something mighty and transcendent in your poetry.

Your interpretations are whimsical and romantic, whereas mine are steeped in realism. The similes and metaphor, the sense of the infinite, the synthesis of day and night, the imagery of stars in contrast with the springtime daylight of flowers; “continuous as the stars that shine, And twinkle on the milky way, Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance”. It is the rhythm of your stanza and line length that offers life. It is the chiming and repletion of soul rather than reality, the repetition of words, of alliterations and assonances, the balancing of lines and phrases; this does add something that cannot be sprung from prose texts.

I began this letter with the feeling I should prove my writing superior to yours. I wanted to question the war of serenity and instability inside your mind with my logic and linear narratives for an answer. But I now realise there is beauty in both realms. And, for that, it seems I cannot decide and I feel I should not.

Yours sincerely,

Your sister,
Dorothy

Works Cited