William Wordsworth along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge were two of the major English romantic poets who helped launch the romantic Age in British literature with their 1798 joint publication called Lyrical Ballads.
Born on April 17, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District where a young William Wordsworth would develop a love for nature with the magnificent landscape of the area. At eight years of age young William lost his mother and five years later his father.
With the help of two of his uncles young William entered a local school and later continued his studies at Cambridge University. It was in 1787 that he made his debut as a writer when he published a sonnet in the European Magazine. The same year he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he got his B.A. in 1791.
It was in 1795 that William Wordsworth would first meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and they would work together where Wordsworth would create his first masterpiece Lyrical Ballads which opened with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
Continuing writing poetry most of Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. Poems that Wordsworth wrote after this period did not receive the attention of what his earlier works had. William Wordsworth would live to be 80 years old and died on April 25, 1850.
The following are some of the love poems created by the Romantic Poet William Wordsworth.
She Was a Phantom of Delight
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin-liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food,
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveller between life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
Lucy Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known
Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.
Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"
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 heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A 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!
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