Notes
1] It seems certain that the changed friend was Coleridge. Wordsworth saw him for the first time in almost three years late in October 1806, and then for several months in the winter when Coleridge visited the Wordsworths during their stay at Coleorton, Sir George Beaumont's house in Leicestershire. Coleridge's long residence abroad, mostly in Malta, had been in the hope of restoring his health which had been much impaired by his addiction to drugs. The hope was not realized. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote: "never never did I feel such a shock as at the first sight of him [in Oct. 1806]. We all felt exactly in the same way--as if he were different from what we had expected to see...." The difference was not merely in appearance and physical health. All the members of the circle of old friends, including Coleridge, were unhappily aware of changes in feeling and relation.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes (1807). See The Manuscript of William Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes (1807): A Facsimile (London: British Library, 1984). bib MASS (Massey College, Toronto).
First publication date:
1807
RPO poem editor: J. R. MacGillivray
RP edition: 3RP 2.388.
Recent editing: 2:2002/3/15
Composition date note: late 1806 or early 1807
Rhyme: ababcc