Who is William Wordsworth
Poet William Wordsworth worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The collection, which contained Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” introduced Romanticism to English poetry. Wordsworth also showed his affinity for nature with the famous poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” He became England’s poet laureate in 1843, a role he held until his death in 1850.
Poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was 7, and he was an orphan at 13. Despite these losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School — where he wrote his first poetry — and went on to study at Cambridge University. He did not excel there, but managed to graduate in 1791.
Wordsworth had visited France in 1790 — in the midst of the French Revolution — and was a supporter of the new government’s republican ideals. On a return trip to France the next year, he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who became pregnant. However, the declaration of war between England and France in 1793 separated the two. Left adrift and without income in England, Wordsworth was influenced by radicals such as William Godwin.
William Wordsworth Quotes
1. The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
2. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
3. Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be.
4. Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.
5. Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.
6. Rest and be thankful.
7. Come grow old with me. The best is yet to be.
8. The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.
9. Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
10. Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
11. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.
12. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
13. With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
14. What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
15. There is a comfort in the strength of love; ‘Twill make a thing endurable, which else would overset the brain, or break the heart.
16. A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
17. The eye–it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.
18. When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude
19. The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
20. My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man
21. Love betters what is best
22. Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
23. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
24. Then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
25. Be mild, and cleave to gentle things,
thy glory and thy happiness be there.
26. What we have loved
Others will love
And we will teach them how.
27. I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
28. To begin, begin.
29. Great God! I’d rather be a Pagan.
30. Delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood.
31. The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.
32. The good die first, and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, burn to the socket.
33. And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.
34. I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
35. What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how; instruct them how the mind of man becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.
36. I had melancholy thoughts…
a strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.
37. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge – it is as immortal as the heart of man.
38. One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
39. The earth was all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.
40. Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
41. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge
42. Faith is a passionate intuition.
43. Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things—
We murder to dissect.
44. What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.
45. Wild is the music
of autumnal winds
Amongst the faded woods.
46. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
47. The child is father of the man:
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
48. And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
49. In ourselves our safety must be sought.
By our own right hand it must be wrought.
50. Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
51. A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.
52. A simple child. That lightly draws its breath. And feels its life in every limb. What should it know of death?
53. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
54. What though the radiance that was once so bright, be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
55. Therefore, let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty-mountain winds be free to blow against thee.
56. From the body of one guilty deed a thousand ghostly fears and haunting thoughts proceed.
57. For oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude
58. She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene,
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
59. Hence, in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
60. All that we behold is full of blessings.
