Dorothy Wordsworth poems appeared in nineteenth-century collections of her brother’s verse. Individual poems began to appear in twentieth-century teaching anthologies, however the first comprehensive presentation of her poems didn’t appear until 1987, when Susan Levin published them as the appendix to her critical study Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, an effort she later amplified with her important teaching edition, Dorothy Wordsworth: A Longman Cultural Edition, in 2009. These were milestone events, as Levin’s editorial work introduced the poems to a broad academic audience and sparked a wave in which scholars such as Pamela Woof, Rachel Feder, Lucy Newlyn, and Levin herself published thoughtful readings of Dorothy’s verse. Since their first appearance in Levin’s monograph in 1987, several of Dorothy’s poems have been anthologized, frequently appearing alongside selections from the Grasmere journal notebooks. Two notable poems, “Thoughts on my Sickbed” and “Grasmere—A Fragment,” have also been included in recent editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Interestingly, the poems currently featured in teaching anthologies are not among the five that were published in Dorothy’s lifetime. Even “Floating Island at Hawkshead,” perhaps her best-known and finest poem, has been omitted. But the anthologized examples are, arguably, those that may be considered her most “Wordsworthian,” insofar as they elaborate themes also found in her brother’s poetry, such as the wonderment and healing powers of nature and the imagination. Furthermore, they converse overtly with William’s poems, offering useful comparisons for the classroom, though also implying through the selection process that what matters most in Dorothy’s verse are these resonances.

This electronic edition applies a different theory of inclusion, as we neither collect all of Dorothy’s known poems, as edited by Levin and pulled from various print and manuscript sources, nor present a selection based on connections with William’s work or subjective judgments on aesthetic value or biographical relevance. Instead, we offer a substantial (and arguably representative) sample based on the material practices of Dorothy’s writing and grounded in a single manuscript: Dove Cottage Manuscript (DCMS) 120, commonly referred to as the “commonplace book” (fig. 6.1). In this battered notebook with paper boards, purchased in November 1820,

Dorothy collected most of the poems she wrote during her lifetime, often in multiple versions. In most cases, she revised while collecting and copying, as is evident by edits on the notebook’s pages, though some poems were copied fair. In total, the notebook’s 89 leaves contain 24 poems in 37 versions. Most of these poems were composed and entered in the notebook between 1826 and 1832, though new entries appeared until 1840.

Rather than seek to identify (or create) fixed versions of her poems through the editorial process, this section of the edition represents the multiple and unsettled versions of her poetry in this one artifact, wherein it becomes possible to observe Dorothy returning to her poems over time as she rereads, revises, and recopies them.

One advantage of studying and editing a single notebook, then, is that it provides access to the messy and complex nature of manuscript writing and literary exchange. One disadvantage is that approaching such a collection can feel unfamiliar and even alienating. DCMS 120 defies many expectations of today’s readers, who are used to encountering regularized print. Like DCMS 20, it starts at both ends, a feature that Margaret Ezell describes as “a doubling of the matter in an inverted format,” resulting in “a practice alien to print technology . . . and disorienting for modern readers.”

As in other draft manuscripts, corrections, revisions, and errors remain visible in layers, as Dorothy works and reworks her lines. Time is thus encoded on the pages in a way that is distinctive to the scribal medium. Meanwhile, white space within the manuscript is unevenly distributed, with some pages left entirely blank, some barely written on, and others crammed with writing. There are pages cut or torn or patched, all contributing to a lack of uniformity that is indicative of the book being filled over time, without a predetermined plan. Text appears at multiple angles and cross-written; there are sheets pasted in horizontally that must be folded out, and the entire book must be manipulated and rotated throughout for proper reading. There are essentially no navigational tools—no tables of contents, indices, signatures, attributions, or page numbers, and very few titles. Legibility, regularity, and re-usability are all compromised. In many ways, then, the notebook is impenetrable to us—undecipherable in places, with missing pages, unknown hands, and unidentified scraps copied and clipped from print and manuscript sources. It is a book in which we struggle to find a single or clear narrative except of use and ongoing engagement. Nonetheless, its tolerance of variation and indeed messiness—the willingness to allow for corrections and variants to remain visible, with draft and fair copies remaining side by side—enables a revisiting of past versions and past selves, very much a Wordsworthian theme at the core of Dorothy’s as well as her brother’s poetics.

A complicated manuscript like DCMS 120 presents special challenges to editors, but the digital platform of Romantic Circles makes it possible for us to convey a sense of the poems’ material environment. Figure 6.2 suggests the many kinds of activities and artifacts in DCMS 120. On the verso appear the last two stanzas of “Irregular Stanzas - Holiday at Gwerndovennant May 1826,” [Version A] (f.18v) with sums visible at the bottom left, demonstrating a thrifty (and very common) use of blank space. On the recto is the final page of a tipped-in fair copy version, on lavender wove paper, of “Grasmere—A Fragment” (insert 2), [Version A] (insert 2b), a poem of unknown date that appears in four versions in the notebook

 and of [Lines Written (rather say begun)] [Version A], a poem that appears in six versions in the notebook. Viewing the open notebook, we also observe the multidirectionality of the writing, which here occurs in three orientations.

Sharon Cameron has observed of Emily Dickinson’s manuscript variants that many appear to place her both within and “outside the ostensible boundaries of the poem.”

Dorothy Wordsworth occupies the same double or multiple positionality, as an older self often encircles a younger one in poems that themselves thematize the passage of time. In this way, throughout DCMS 120, we observe traces of Dorothy rereading and reworking her own life. Often her revisions are less about altering the meaning and more about accentuating and perhaps even, in the act of rewriting, re-experiencing feelings. As Pamela Woof perceptively observes, “The constant return to lines and snatches from the poems provides for her a way to investigate her own mind.”

In penciled additions to “Lines intended for my Niece’s Album,” Dorothy underlines the phrase “no longer young” apparently to add emphasis and to mark the additional passage of time since the poem was originally written, or both.

She also uses penciled marginal notes to adjust the pronouns: in ink, she refers to the time “when the cold earth covers her,” but in her penciled markings—more variant readings than revisions—she returns the poem to the more intimate, if morbid, first person, imagining the moment when “the cold earth covers me.” By preserving this adjustment, which directly invokes the poet’s mortality, the manuscript reveals acts of rereading and reengagement that personalize and renew the poetry’s meaning.

Of the 30 Dorothy Wordsworth poems that survive in manuscript form, five were published anonymously during her lifetime in collections of her brother William’s works. Three of these, dating to 1805–1807— “An address to a Child in a high wind,” “The Mother’s Return,” and “To my niece Dorothy, a sleepless Baby”

—appeared as the “work of a Female Friend” of the author in Poems by William Wordsworth (1815).

Several decades later, two additional poems, “Loving & Liking” and “Floating Island at Hawkshead,” were included semi-anonymously in the 1836 and 1842 editions, respectively, of William’s collected works.

While these latter two poems and 20 others by Dorothy appear in DCMS 120, the three poems published in 1815 do not. Given that she did not purchase the notebook until five years after these poems’ first appearance in print, she apparently saw no reason to recopy and collect them. This theory is supported by the fact that DCMS 120 does include several versions of “Loving & Liking” and “Floating Island,” which were not published until long after she obtained the notebook.

Beyond the 22 poems in DCMS 120 and the three early printed poems, Dorothy wrote an additional five poems, which survive in letters, loose sheets, or volumes of her Rydal Journals.

These five are relatively short (the longest is 20 lines), and four are clearly addressed to members of her social circle. Evidence that nearly all of her poems circulated in manuscript during her lifetime comes in surviving copies included in her correspondence and written in the hands of family or friends. Though this introduction primarily addresses the poems contained in DCMS 120 and the practices of drafting, revision, collection, and sharing revealed within its pages, it is important to acknowledge the notebook’s place within a larger set of surviving documents that demonstrate Dorothy writing and sharing her verses.

While most poems in DCMS 120—15 in number—are presented in only one version, seven appear in multiple revisions. One poem, “Lines written (rather say begun),” appears in seven distinct versions. As is to be expected with a working notebook that is filled over years, the poems are not organized or arranged in any prescribed or logical order. Moreover, as previously noted, DCMS 120 is an amigraph— a book filled from both ends. How, then, to number the pages? The stationer’s label on the cover determines the orientation we designate as the front, and indeed the notebook is largely filled from that end.

It is possible that Dorothy began to fill the notebook from the front first, as the first dated entry is from 1830, and then began to use the book from the rear cover, chiefly to attach copies of her poems made by others, with the first copy pasted in being “Lines to Dora” and dated 1835. After 1835, she likely used the book from both ends. An amigraph is a difficult object to replicate outside of a physical facsimile, as it is arguably even more difficult to flip a screen than it is a book. As displayed by this edition’s Alternative Tables of Contents and explained at length in its headnote, we have attempted to present this aspect of the notebook as transparently as possible.

Dorothy frequently expressed anxiety about her poetic abilities, and her self-deprecating statements have shaped the reception of her poetry, which has received less attention and far less praise than the journals and her travel writing. When, in 1806, her friend and quasi-patron Lady Beaumont encouraged her to try verse, Dorothy responded with a detailed history of her efforts in the genre that is worth quoting at length: ‘Believe me, since I received your letter I have made several attempts (could I do less as you request that I would for your sake?) and have been obliged to give it up in despair; and looking into my mind I find nothing there, even if I had the gift of language and numbers, that I could have the vanity to suppose could be of any use beyond our own fireside, or to please, as in your case, a few partial friends; but I have no command of language, no power of expressing my ideas, and no one was ever more inapt at molding words into regular metre. I have often tried when I have been walking alone (muttering to myself as is my Brother’s custom) to express my feelings in verse; feelings, and ideas such as they were, I have never wanted at those times; but prose and rhyme and blank verse were jumbled together and nothing ever came of it.'

 Family members sometimes repeated this narrative of Dorothy struggling with formal verse. In 1832, for instance, Dora enclosed some of her aunt’s verses in a letter to Edward Quillinan, remarking, “You must excuse limping measure. Aunt cannot write regular metre.”

Partly due to such assessments, Dorothy’s poems have been regarded as categorically inferior to her prose works, even by sympathetic readers. The preeminent early twentieth-century Wordsworth scholar Ernest de Sélincourt, for one, concluded that her poems “have little intrinsic merit,” opining that “only rarely are they lit up by that alertness of vision and felicity of phrasing of which to the last her prose was capable.”

At the opposite end of the twentieth century, the pioneering editor of her works, Susan Levin, summed up the enduring consensus that “uneven in quality, Dorothy’s poetry sometimes has the effect of making us more appreciative of her talents as a prose writer.”

In the aforementioned letter to Lady Beaumont, Dorothy claims to have no expressive power or metrical ability; however, she was in a singularly challenging position in attempting to compose poetry alongside her brother, particularly in 1806, when William was writing some of the finest poetry of his life. Levin describes this “anxiety of influence” making it “difficult for Dorothy to write poetry.” In this reading, Dorothy’s habitual self-denigration is everywhere evident as she sets her poems against his.

Some evidence supports this view. Even two decades later, in “To Julia Marshall —A Fragment,” (11) a poem dated to 1827 and addressed to her goddaughter, whose mother, Jane Pollard Marshall, was Dorothy’s lifelong friend, she explores her fraught relationship with poetry. She returns to her childhood and explains that, even though she “reverenced the Poets’ skill,”

Rather than amplify this narrative of constraint and discouragement, however, we prefer to frame our approach to Dorothy’s poetry by asking, to paraphrase Margaret Ezell, “‘What is this author attempting to do?’”

Unlike her brother, Dorothy did not regularly compose poetry with print publication in mind. Instead, she usually addressed her poems to specific individuals, or to commemorate specific experiences or events. As she explains in the 1806 letter to Lady Beaumont, she wrote primarily for friends and family, rarely imagining an audience that extended “beyond [their] own fireside.” She also appears to have found it difficult to write upon command, as her friends’ requests for verse often languished. For the most part, Dorothy seems to have written when inspired, to reflect on stirring moments, or to express special friendship. Though she preserved only a small number of poems, she returned to many of these, reworking and copying them for friends and family. Some of the poems, of course, found enthusiastic readers, as when Charles and Mary Lamb praised “Address to a Child” as “masterly.”

But Dorothy’s body of poetry illustrates an understanding of herself as primarily a manuscript poet, writing for a select few but also rewriting and rereading for herself.

In several poems, Dorothy writes as a fixture in her brother’s home and loving aunt to his children. As Levin has observed, “Many of Dorothy’s poems are written in the voice of a woman who considers her life and her past in relation to the children or younger women around her.”

Importantly, of the five Dorothy poems published with William’s during her lifetime, four of them explicitly position her as a maiden aunt or caregiver, casting her into a role of helpmate that continues to shape understandings of her and her writing. The titles of the three early poems published in 1815 describe her helping to rear Dora (born in 1804), Thomas (1806), Catherine (1808), and Willy (1810). By contrast, among the later poems included in DCMS 120, only “Loving & Liking” addresses a young child, gently admonishing its addressee for claiming to love roasted fowl. The speaker of the poem instructs the child that animals can be loved only in their natural environments, not when they have been made to serve human needs or tastes.

In “Lines intended for my Niece’s Album,” Dorothy asks, “But why should I inscribe my name, / No Poet I — no longer young?” In such verses, Dorothy associates poetry with youth, expressing amusement and perhaps discomfort with being a sexagenarian generator of keepsakes. Some months later, she signs herself, in a poem addressed to Edith’s sister, “Miss Bertha Southey,” as “D. Wordsworth Old Poetess. Oct. 7th 1836.” Most of her surviving poems were composed in her 50s and 60s, and in them she regularly plays the role of the “aged Friend, ” as she puts it in “Lines intended for my Niece’s Album.” Levin observes that poems to the younger generation afforded Dorothy an opportunity to meditate upon her own past and present: ‘In certain of her poems, an older, sickly, “enfeebled” speaker addresses a young woman who serves as both her contrast and complement. The writing of the poems establishes a series of oppositions such as youth/age, health/sickness, freedom in nature/sickroom as prison. Setting out these positions in composing the poem, the narrator encounters her own youthful energies mirrored in the young women she addresses. ’

In the poignant “Thoughts on my Sick-Bed” (16), it is memory that rescues Dorothy from the captivity of illness. The poem is dated to the early spring of 1832, after her first extended period of confinement that began in 1830. Much like Coleridge’s 1797 poem “This Lime Tree Bower, my Prison,” in which Coleridge laments being unable to join his friends on a ramble due to a recent injury, “Thoughts on my Sick-Bed,” depicts Dorothy imprisoned in her room at Rydal Mount. The speaker, for whom walking outdoors has been such an important part of life, now finds herself disabled. But, like Coleridge, she rejoices in the creative powers that allow her to imagine that she is not confined, and she ultimately refutes her entrapment. “I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes,” she concludes, “And with Memory I was there.” In “This Lime Tree Bower, my Prison,” Coleridge finds that neither nature nor his friends have deserted him, as he enjoys the capacity to traverse space in his mind’s eye, providing him much to delight and soothe him. For Dorothy, a gift of spring flowers, brought by friends, spurs the powers of her imagination and transports her beyond the four walls of her room:

It bore me to the Terrace walk

I trod the hills again; —

No prisoner in this lonely room,

I saw the green banks of the Wye,

Recalling thy prophetic words,

⁽²⁴⁾

The “prophetic words” occur in the final section of WW’s “Tintern Abbey,” especially in lines 137–59, which imagine DW’s “after years” and predict that memories will bring her joy and consolation.

 

Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy!

Reflections on those early wishes also appear in Dorothy’s “Irregular Verses” [Version B of "To Julia Marshall–A Fragment"] (17) She recalls that she had imagined sharing a home with her friend Jane Pollard as well as with William.

This ideal, however, did not materialize, as Jane married and had her own family:

Such was the spot I fondly framed

When life was new, and hope untamed:

There with my one dear Friend would dwell,

Nor wish for aught beyond the dell.

Alas! the cottage fled in air,

The streamlet never flowed:

Dorothy did, of course, establish a household with her brother, and many of her poems celebrate visions of their home, at Dove Cottage until 1808 and at other residences until 1813, when they moved to Rydal Mount, where they would remain until their deaths.

As noted, DCMS 120’s label (see fig. 6.1) survives to provide details about where it was purchased. It indicates that the book was bought at GRISET FILS AINÉ, a shop in Boulogne-Sur-Mer that Dorothy, William, and Mary Wordsworth visited in November 1820 near the end of a Continental tour.

Part workbook for her verse, part poetic miscellany, part commonplace book, and part scrapbook, the notebook embodies what Margaret Ezell terms “messy” manuscript volumes, domestic literary artifacts that have been largely invisible to modern scholars precisely because of their refusal to conform to print norms.