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Unread 06-05-2022, 05:21 PM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
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Default Wordsworth on the Death Penalty

I had never heard of these sonnets.

https://poemfull.com/william-wordswo...ath/index.html
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Unread 06-06-2022, 07:47 AM
Chris O'Carroll Chris O'Carroll is offline
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My favorite English professor used to talk about these sonnets in the context of Wordsworth's movement from youthful radicalism to a conservative old age. But I had never read them. Not the poet's best work, are they? Nevertheless, thanks for posting them.
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Unread 06-06-2022, 09:36 AM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is online now
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I had a professor who referred to Wordsworth's last decades as the longest literary senility on record. He apparently wrote dozens of sonnets as boring and tendentious as these.
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Unread 06-06-2022, 02:33 PM
Mary McLean Mary McLean is offline
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...And Wordsworth in a rather long Excursion
(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages)
Has given a sample from the vasty version
Of his new system to perplex the sages.
’Tis poetry, at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the Dog Star rages,
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the tower of Babel....
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Unread 06-07-2022, 08:48 AM
David Anthony David Anthony is offline
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A Sonnet
TWO voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times--good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.
J. K. Stephen
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