The Reverie of Poor Susan
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her?
She seesA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
Form: aabb Composition Date:1798?1.
Date of composition uncertain, perhaps in the late summer of 1798 when Wordsworth was in London.
The streets mentioned are all in the City of London.
A fifth quatrain, beginning "Poor Outcast! return" was in the poem as first published, but was omitted after 1800.
William Wordsworth
Other author posts
After-Thought
I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, As being past away —Vain sympathies For, backward, Duddon
Daffodils
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
Anecdote For Fathers
I VE a boy of five years old; His face is fair and fresh to see; His limbs are cast in beauty's
Dion [See Plutarch]
Serene, and fitted to embrace, Where'er he turned, a swan-like grace Of haughtiness without pretence, And to unfold a still magnificence, Was princely Dion, in the power And beauty of his happier hour And what pure homage then did wait On Dio...
