Everyone knows the 1805 version of The Prelude is better than the 1850 version — Wordsworth could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d left it alone. Reading through my parallel text edition, my eyes strayed over to the right-hand page from time to time, but usually not for long — the older Wordsworth seemed to have an uncanny gift for blunting the edge of his youthful inspiration.
But in Book III, ‘Residence at Cambridge’, I stumbled across an unexpected gem in the description of St John’s College. Here’s the 1805 version:
And from my bedroom, I in moonlight nights
Could see, right opposite, a few yards off,
The antechapel, where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face.
The 1850 version has a couple of extra lines:
And from my bedroom, I in moonlight nights
Could see, right opposite, a few yards off,
The antechapel, where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
Not only is that an improvement, those are two of the best lines in Wordsworth. I started to wonder if I was reading the wrong version. But I haven’t found any other revisions in the 1850 version that are remotely as good as this.
Have you?
That’s beautiful! I must confess to never having been a fan, but this may have changed that…
Good eh? There’s a lot of great stuff in Wordsworth – and an awful lot of mediocre stuff as well. A good Selected Poems should sift the wheat from the chaff!
Have a look at Ruth Abbott’s PHD project
Why? What’s in it?