New Wordsworth
Poems Discovered!
by John
Blumenthal
The literary community is
abuzz over the discovery of a heretofore unknown
collection of poems by the English poet William
Wordsworth. The cache includes early verses,
giving scholars new insight into the poet’s
youth. As early as his fourth year, Wordsworth
penned these immortal lines, “Lo, on my
birthday/My father gave me a small wooden
horse/ Which he had made out of clay/I was hoping
for socks.”
At 21, Wordsworth received
his degree from Eton, but considered it a waste
of time. “The manners of the young men were
very frantic and dissolute at the time,” he
wrote. We now know that Wordsworth was referring
to a specific incident in which a group of fellow
students “beat me about the head with a
frozen whitefish.” Grief-stricken,
Wordsworth avenged them by locking himself in a
broom closet with a dozen cupcakes and a box of
buttons.
Soon thereafter, he wrote
the Romantic poem “My Spectre Around Me
Night and Day.” This achievement, though
remarkable, has puzzled scholars since the
identical poem had been written some years before
by Robert Burns.
In 1791, Wordsworth met the
woman who was to become his wife, and later, the
inspiration for his poem “Eyesore.”
Historians know that they courted for two years
and that Wordsworth arrived at the wedding with a
pair of tap shoes and a sack of Belgian waffles.
Afterwards, he penned this poem: “Thy eyes
are as the blackness of pitch/Thy hair glows like
the exotic silks of Asia/Thy frame often blocks
out the light.”
Another fascinating poem
contained in the cache includes “Reflections
on a Painting by Someone Named Dwight,”
which begins with the lines: “There was a
roaring in the wind/The rain came heavily/But now
the sun is rising bright/Two dogs through the
garden, no mayo.”
Self-doubt plagued him
during his entire life. Not only did he consider
himself a dismal failure as a poet, he was
incapable of appreciating upholstery. This
flaw, along with Wordsworth’s habit of
offering advice to sofas, inspired his colleague
Percy Byshhe Shelley to call him “a man who
cannot cook soup.” In response to this
heinous insult, Wordsworth likens his friend to
“that substance so dear which oftimes
resides in compost.”
But in all of Wordsworth’s
random musings, we find one that truly reveals
the poet’s genius: “The earth moves
when I touch thee/The mountains rise up volcanic
when you sing/Together we walk along the meadow
fence/Come, let us delight in the taste of
mittens.”
Most exciting of all, we
now know conclusively that Wordsworth stopped
creating poetry after his death in 1850. His last
poem, “On the Importance of Drapes,”
contains these immortal stanzas, “Woe is me
for I shall succumb/To the earth beneath which I
shall be silent for eternity or longer/ Perhaps I
should bring a sandwich.”
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