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the church of the quoad civilia parish of Alloway; but this parish having been annexed to that of Ayr in 1690, the church fell more or less to ruin, and when Burns wrote had been roofless for half a century. It stands some two hundred yards to the north of the picturesque Auld Brig of Doon. . . . Burns's birthplace is about three-fourths of a mile to the north; so that the ground and its legends were familiar to him from the first."

A good many local traditions centered around the old church; some of them Burns has worked into the poem.

SCOTS WHA HAE

377. The poem is often called "Bruce's Address to his Army."

AULD LANG SYNE

378. A song of this name, of which various Scottish poets had written versions, was well known in Scotland before Burns composed his verses.

OF A' THE AIRTS THE WIND CAN BLAW "The song I composed out of compliment to Mrs. Burns." (Burns's note, quoted in Centenary Burns, iii. 345.)

FLOW GENTLY, SWEET AFTON

380. 3. My Mary. If any definite person is referred to here,—and this is uncertain,— it is not Mary Campbell. See the Centenary Burns, iii. 395.

HIGHLAND MARY

381. The poem is reminiscent of Burns's devotion to Mary Campbell. The editors of the Centenary tell what is known of her (iii. 308).

BLAKE

CRADLE SONG

384. 20. While o'er thee thy mother weep. The line (like 11-12 and 15-16) is ungrammatical, but the reading thy seems to have the weight of authority on its side; certain editions emend thy to doth.

CRABBE

THE VILLAGE

386. 9. Smooth alternate verse. See Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, Eclogue second, for an example of "alternate verse," in which first Cuddie and then Thenot speaks.

18. Mantuan song. Virgil's poetry (here his pastorals).

27. Honest Duck. A minor poet of the first half of the 18th century.

387. 89. The lawless merchant of the main. The smuggler.

THE BOROUGH

The story of Peter Grimes forms Letter xxii of the poem.

WORDSWORTH

PREFACE TO THE LYRICAL BALLADS

389. The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798; the second edition, in December, 1800, carried a lengthy Preface, from which two passages are here reprinted.

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING

392. The poem is notable as an expression of Wordsworth's idea that Nature is a conscious, sentient spirit.

TINTERN ABBEY

393. 22-49. In this passage Wordsworth states the effect that the recollection of the landscape he has just been describing has had on him. First, it has brought him mental restoration in hours of weariness; second, "feelings of unremembered pleasure " which have prompted him to acts of kindness and of love "; and lastly, it has brought him the mystic's power of seeing beyond the superficial, the apparent, into "the life of things." 394. 72-111. This passage, with which one should compare lines 175-203 of the Intimations of Immortality, is the best statement of Wordsworth's changing attitude towards Nature. The panpsychism, almost the pantheism, of lines 93-102, is noteworthy.

116. My dear, dear friend. Wordsworth's sister Dorothy was the poet's most intimate companion during the years from 1795 to 1802. On their life together one can consult no better work than Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals.

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"WritThe

Wordsworth notes of this poem: ten at Town-end, Grasmere. 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 live 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."

Wordsworth lived at Grasmere from 1799 to 1813.

MY HEART LEAPS UP

406. 9. Natural piety. Reverence, affection for Nature. Wordsworth chose the last three lines for the motto of his Ode: Intimations of Immortality.

RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE

407. 43. I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous Boy. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who poisoned himself, in a fit of despondency, before he was eighteen years old. 45. Him who walked in glory. Burns. 97. Grave Livers. Persons of solemn deportment.

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ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY

413. A part of Wordsworth's note on the poem runs as follows: Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. It was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the Spirit within me. . . . To that dream-like vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood, everyone, I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here: but having in the poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an element in our instincts of immortality."

The argument of the poems proceeds from stanza to stanza as follows:

1. I can no longer see the celestial beauty which once enfolded every object in nature. 2. Nature is the same, but the glory has passed away.

3. The utterance of this thought brought relief from the sadness it occasioned: "No more shall grief of mine the season wrong."

4. Despite the happiness of Nature on "this sweet May-morning," the "glory

and the dream" have gone; "whither is fled the visionary gleam? 413. 5. The child brings with him into this

world recollections of Heaven; the older we become the farther we journey from the celestial vision of childhood, till at length

the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
6. The Earth, man's foster-mother, does
all she can to make the child

"Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came."
7. The child in his play imitates all the
businesses of life.

8. Why should he do this, and hurry him-
self into the yoke of manhood?

9. Let us give thanks for the "shadowy recollections" which persist from childhood into maturity to uphold and cherish us.

10. Even though the celestial radiance has now departed from the world, I can still be joyful, finding strength in human sympathy, and

In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind." II. And Nature still is beautiful, for the love I feel for her is strengthened and enriched by years of experience with the world, and by sympathetic association with men.

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tenth of November, 1793, the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Notre Dame Cathedral.

418. 66. From bleak Helvetia's icy caverns. The ode was occasioned by the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798.

KUBLA KHAN

419. Coleridge writes, in his preface to the poem: "In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he [Coleridge] fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business . . . and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found that. all the rest had passed away." Professor William A. Neilson, in his recent Essentials of Poetry, writes: "In . . . Coleridge's Kubla Khan we have no wrestling with spiritual questions, no lofty solution of the problem of conduct found through brooding on the beauties of nature. Instead, a thousand impressions received from the senses, from records of Oriental travel, from numberless romantic tales, have been taken in by the author, dissolved as in a crucible by the fierce heat of his imagination, and are poured forth a molten stream of sensuous imagery, incalculable in its variety of suggestion, yet homogeneous, unified, and, despite its fragmentary character, the ultimate expression of a whole romantic world" (p. 43).

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THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

In Wordsworth's note on his own poem, We Are Seven, the following passage explains the origin of the Ancient Mariner: "In the spring of the year 1798 [Coleridge], my sister, and myself, started. to visit Linton. In the course of this walk was planned the poem of the

Ancient Mariner, founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend, Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention; but certain parts I myself suggested:for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime, and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages a day or two before that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses. 'Suppose,' said I, you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary Spirits of those regions take upon them to avenge the crime!' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. We began the composition together on that, to me, memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular:

'And listened like a three years' child; The Mariner had his will.'”

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p. 512.

27. That fluttering stranger. "A flake or film of soot hanging on the bar of a grate, supposed to foretell the advent of a stranger." (English Dialect Dictionary.) 38. The stern. preceptor. Boyer, the famous "

flogging master " of Christ's

Hospital. 43. Sister more beloved. Between Coleridge and his sister Ann, who died in 1791, there was a strong attachment.

55. Thou, my babe! shalt wander, etc. The prophecy in these lines was fulfilled when in 1800 Coleridge moved to Greta Hall, Keswick, in the lake district.

DEJECTION: AN ODE

433. The poem was first printed on the fourth of October, 1802,-the day of Words

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442. 10. Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu. Roderick, the descendant of Alpine." (Scott.)

12. Beltane. May-day.

CORONACH

443. "The Coronach of the Highlanders was a wild expression of lamentation, poured forth by the mourners over the body of a departed friend. When the words of it were articulate, they expressed the praises of the deceased, and the loss the clan would sustain by his death." (Scott.) 17. Correi. The side of a hill. 18. Cumber. Difficulty.

HARP OF THE NORTH

443. This is a sort of epilogue to The Lady of the Lake.

JOCK OF HAZELDEAN

444. The first stanza is traditional; see F. J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v. 159, for the older John of Hazelgreen on which Scott modelled his song.

BRIGNALL BANKS

From Rokeby.

COUNTY GUY

445. From Quentin Durward.

BONNY DUNDEE

From The Doom of Devorgoil. 1. Claver'se. John Graham of Claverhouse (1649?-1689), an ardent and successful partisan of Charles II, won the title "bloody Claver'se" by his persecution of the Scottish Dissenters during the last years of Charles's reign. In 1688 he was created first Viscount Dundee by James II. After James's flight, Claverhouse maintained a royal army in Scotland, and won the battle of Killiecrankie in July, 1689, but died of a wound the night of the victory. The incident referred to in the poem took place March 18, 1688, when Claverhouse rode out of Edinburgh at the head of some fifty dragoons, having bolted the Convention that was to determine Scotland's attitude towards James II.

13. The Bow. Bow Street, Edinburgh. 14. Ilk carline was flyting and shaking her pow. Every old woman was scolding and wagging her head.

15. The young plants of grace they looked couthie and slee. The young men looked kindly and sly.

17. The Grassmarket. An open square in the center of the city, formerly used for public executions. See The Heart of Midlothian, Chapter ii.

21. Cowls of Kilmarnock. The Presbyterian Whigs, who were all anti-Stuart. 22. Lang hafted gullies. Long handled knives.

Castle

23. Close-head. The entrance to a blind alley. (Engl. Dialect Dictionary.) 25. Castle rock. Edinburgh stands on a high rock above the city. 27. Mons Meg and her marrows. Meg" was a famous cannon of unusual

size.

Mons

30. Montrose. James Graham (16121650), fifth Earl and first Marquis of Montrose, was Charles I's most successful lieutenant during the Civil War. He was captured and executed by the Earl of Argyle in 1650.

446. 35. Duniewassals. Highland gentlemen of somewhat inferior rank.

BYRON

KNOW YE THE LAND

3. The turtle. The turtle dove. 8. Gúl. The rose.

THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB

447. See 2 Kings, xix: 35.

MY BOAT IS ON THE SHORE

448. Tom Moore and Byron were for many years intimate friends.

SONNET ON CHILLON; THE PRISONER OF

CHILLON

François de Bonnivard (1493-1570), a patriotic citizen of Geneva, undertook to defend the city against the Duke of Savoy. In this he was unsuccessful, and after various adventures, was imprisoned in the castle of Chillon from 1530 to 1536. The castle stands on the shore of the Lake of Geneva.

449. 107. Lake Leman. The Lake of Geneva.

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE: CANTO III

452. 182. Belgium's capital. Brussels. See Thackeray's description of Brussels during Waterloo, in Vanity Fair.

200. Brunswick's fated chieftain. The Duke of Brunswick. His father had been killed at Jena, in 1806.

453. 226. "Cameron's Gathering." The pibroch, or martial rallying song, played on the bagpipe. The clan Cameron had been "out" under Prince Charles Stuart in 1745, but was enthusiastically loyal in 1815.

227. Albyn's. Scotland's.

235. Ardennes. Byron notes: "The wood of Soignies is supposed to be a remnant of the forest of Ardennes,' famous in Boiardo's Orlando, and immortal in Shakespeare's As You Like It."

455. 848. Cytherea's zone. Venus's girdle, which inspired the beholder with love for the wearer.

CANTO IV

456. 1. The Bridge of Sighs. The famous bridge leading from the Doge's Palace to the prison.

8. The winged Lion. The winged lion of St. Mark, the emblem of the Venetian republic.

10. Cybele. Daughter of Uranus, and mother of Zeus; sometimes known as Rhea, and represented as wearing a tiara of towers.

19. Tasso. Torquato Tasso (1544-1505), Italian poet, author of Jerusalem Delivered.

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