Selected Poems

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth in the Lake District and educated at Cambridge. As a young man he was fired with enthusiasm for the French Revolution but the year he spent in France after graduating left him disillusioned with radical politics. He turned more seriously to literature and, in collaboration with his friend Coleridge, produced Lyrical Ballads (1798). His return to the Lake District in 1799 marked the beginning of his most productive period as a poet, during which he wrote his most famous long poem, The Prelude (1805). Stephen Gill a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh Universities and is a long-serving member of the Wordsworth Trust. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998).

William Wordsworth: Selected PoemsChronology Introduction Further Reading A Note on the Texts Selected Poems Old Man Travelling The Ruined Cottage A Night-Piece The Old Cumberland Beggar Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House Goody Blake and Harry Gill The Thorn The Idiot Boy Lines Written in Early Spring Anecdote for Fathers We Are Seven Expostulation and Reply The Tables Turned Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey The Fountain The Two April Mornings 'A slumber did my spirit seal' Song ('She dwelt among th' untrodden ways') 'Strange fits of passion I have known' Lucy Gray Nutting 'Three years she grew in sun and shower' The Brothers Hart-Leap Well from Home at Grasmere from Poems on the Naming of Places To Joanna 'A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags' Michael 'I travelled among unknown Men' To a Sky-Lark Alice Fell Beggars To a Butterfly ('Stay near me') To the Cuckoo 'My heart leaps up when i behold' To H. C., Six Years Old 'Among all lovely things my Love had been' To a Butterfly ('I've watched you') Resolution and Independence 'Within our happy Castle there dwelt one' 'The world is too much with us' 'With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh' 'Dear Native Brooks your ways have i pursued' 'Great Men have been among us' 'It is not to be thought of that the Flood' 'When I have borne in memory what has tamed' 'England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean' Composed by the Seas-Side, near Calais 'It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free' To Toussaint L'Ouverture Composed in the Valley, near Dover, on the Day of Landing Composed Upon Westminster Bridge London, 1802 'Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room' Yarrow Unvisited 'She was a Phantom of delight' Ode to Duty Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood 'I wandered lonely as a Cloud' Stepping Westward The Solitary Reaper Elegiac Stanzas A Complaint Gipsies St. Paul's 'Surprised by joyimpatient asthe Wind' Yew-Trees Composed at Cora Linn Yarrow Visited To R. B. Haydon, Esq. ('High is our calling, Friend!') Sequel to the Foregoing (Beggars) Ode: Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty The River Duddon: Conclusion 'The unremitting voice of nightly streams' Airey-Force Valley Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg 'Glad sight wherever new with old' At Furness Abbey 'I know an aged Man constrained to dwell' from The Prelude Book I Book II Book III Book IV Book V Book VI Book VII Book VIII Book IX Book X Book XI Book XII Book XIII Notes Index of Titles Index of First Lines