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.
