William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth on the borders of the beautiful English lake country. During a boyhood spent largely out of doors, rowing, walking, and skating, he imbibed a love for nature which had a broader Wordsworth, though a radical in his youth, became more conservative in later years. He was a man of quiet tastes, and deliberately chose to live where he could be among simple people. As a poet, he was first of all an interpreter of nature, endowed with extraordinary keenness of observation and delighting in all her phases. In humanity, too, he had a sympathetic interest, especially in the everyday emotions and occupations of the plain men and women around him. And influencing his attitude toward both nature and humanity was a sort of religious mysticism which conceived the spirit of Michael (Page 21)Written in 1800 and published in the same year. Wordsworth's own note on the poem is as follows: "Written at Town-end, Grasmere, about the same time as 'The Brothers.' The Sheepfold, on which so much of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and circumstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many years before, the house we lived in at Town-end, along with some fields and woodlands on the eastern shore of Grasmere. The name of the Evening Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side of the valley, more to the north." Lucy Gray; or, Solitude (Page 36)Written in 1799 and published first in 1800. Wordsworth says of it: "Written at Goslar in Germany. It was founded on a circumstance told me by my Sister, of a little girl, who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snowstorm. Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal." |