Elegaic Stanzas
Elegaic Stanzas by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth saw the picture (shown left), Peele Castle in a storm by Sir George Howland Beaumont (1753-1827), at Beaumont's house in Grosvenor Square in London in spring 1806. It moved him to write his great Elegaic Stanzas, lamenting the death of his brother John in a shipwreck in Weymouth bay the previous year.
The poem was published as untitled verse with the first line 'I only looked for pain and grief.' In the poem Wordsworth typically finds consolation in nature as he remembers John's fondness for Grasmere : 'Here did we stop, and here looked round [...] Our home and his, his heart's delight, / His quiet heart's delicious home.' (ii.41, 46-7). The manuscript can be seen in the Wordsworth Museum.
Sir George Beaumont, a wealthy landowner, was a friend to Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He had a reputation in his day as a landscape painter and the donation of a major part of his art collection to the nation had a decisive effect on the creation of the National Gallery in London. Peele Castle is on the coast of Lancashire (now part of Cumbria), near the village of Rampside at Dalton-in-Furness where Wordsworth had spent a month visiting a cousin in 1796.
Elegiac Stanzas
Suggested by a picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm,
painted by Sir George Beaumont
I was thy Neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.
How perfect was the calm! It seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things.
Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter's hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream;
I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile!
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss:
Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house, a mine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven: -
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.
A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.
Such, in the fond delusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part;
A faith, a trust, that could not be betrayed.
So once it would have been, - 'tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new controul:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanized my Soul.
Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.
Then Beaumont, Friend! Who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This Work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and the dismal shore.
Oh 'tis a passionate Work! - yet wise and well;
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!
And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The light'ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
Farewell, farewell the Heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind.
But welcome fortitude, and patient chear,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. -
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
Written May-June 1806
Published 1807
Read about the the loss of Wordsworth's brother, John in the Earl of Abergavenny disaster.
