THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - VOL 1 (Completed)

EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY

Composed 1798.--Published 1798.

[This poem is a favourite among the Quakers, as I have learned on many occasions. It was composed in front of the house of Alfoxden, in the spring of 1798. [A]--I.F.]

Included among the "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection."--Ed.

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THE POEM

"Why, William, on that old grey stone,

Thus for the length of half a day,

Why, William, sit you thus alone,

And dream your time away?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed

To Beings else forlorn and blind!

Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed

From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,

As if she for no purpose bore you;

As if you were her first-born birth,

And none had lived before you!"

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,

When life was sweet, I knew not why,

To me my good friend Matthew spake,

And thus I made reply.

"The eye--it cannot choose but see;

We cannot bid the ear be still;

Our bodies feel, where'er they be,

Against or with our will.

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum

Of things for ever speaking,

That nothing of itself will come,

But we must still be seeking? "

--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,

Conversing as I may,

I sit upon this old grey stone,

And dream my time away."

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FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A: In his "Advertisement" to the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) Wordsworth writes,

"The lines entitled 'Expostulation and Reply', and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of Moral Philosophy."

Was the friend Sir James Mackintosh? or was it--a much more probable supposition--his friend, S. T. Coleridge?--Ed.]

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