Style and Technique

Abstract

Wordworth was famous among his neighbours for the way he composed his poems aloud as he walked along: ‘Turble fond o’ study on t’rwoads, specially at night time, and wi’ a girt voice bumming away fit to flayte aw the childer to death ameast, not but what Miss Dorothy did the best part of pitting his potry togidder’. The sight of ‘old Wudsworth’ booming away, ‘his jaws working the whoal time’, was clearly a memorable one, and Wordsworth himself gives a vivid account of the embarrassments connected with his method in Book IV. ‘When at evening on the public way / I sauntered like a river murmuring / And talking to itself when all things else / Are still’, the household terrier who accompanied him — ‘we were the happiest pair on earth’ — would turn back at the sight of other walkers approaching to give his master warning. Then Wordsworth ‘hushed / My voice, composed my gait’ and exchanged greetings with whoever was coming, hoping thus (unsuccessfully it appears) to escape ‘rumours, such as wait / On men suspected to be crazed in brain’. When he reached home, he would dictate what he had composed to his devoted womenfolk, emend, often over a long period, and at last let Dorothy or Mary make a fair copy.