The Reverie of Poor Susan
The Reverie of Poor Susan
Original Text
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with other poems, 2nd edn. (London: Longman and Rees, 1800). 2 vols. No./5 (Victoria College Library, Toronto).
2Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
3Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
4In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.
5'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
6A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
7Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
8And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
9Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
10Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
11And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
12The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
13She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
14The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
15The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
16And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
Notes
1] Date of composition uncertain, perhaps in the late summer of 1798 when Wordsworth was in London. The streets mentioned are all in the City of London. A fifth quatrain, beginning "Poor Outcast! return" was in the poem as first published, but was omitted after 1800. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1800
RPO poem Editors
J. R. MacGillivray
RPO Edition
3RP 2.332.
Rhyme