Summary
"To Wordsworth" takes the form of an apostrophe to the poet William Wordsworth, a first-generation Romantic poet. The poem is modeled after a Shakespearean sonnet with an altered sestet. Through form and content, Shelley engages in a dialogue with the older poet, expressing his sense of betrayal due to Wordsworth's changing political views. From the beginning, Shelley alludes to Wordsworth's famous poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" in which Wordsworth reflects on the loss of the wonder and majesty he felt toward the natural world as a child. He expresses his sympathy with Wordsworth's poems and the losses that he and Wordsworth share—losses that are common to all of humanity. But there is a particular loss that, while felt by both poets, Shelley hates: the loss of the Wordsworth that wrote poetry dedicated to "truth and liberty." This Wordsworth was a guiding light and a place of refuge for Shelley, but is now gone, leaving him in the dark and without a safe haven.
The poem operates around the metaphor of Wordsworth's death, referring to the change in Wordsworth's political leanings. The poem not only the loss of moments and emotions but also the feelings of the poet who witnesses and mourns the loss of what once existed. Shelley transitions through observations of a natural current state, referencing Wordsworth's being using figurative language. When he returns to try to find the old Wordworth he admired he is—in keeping with Wordsworth's own structure of poetic melancholy—already gone. Shelley concludes with the distillation of his sentiment, centering on the sadness that Wordsworth, who celebrated in Intimations of Immortality the moments that transcend time, has perished.
Analysis
The sonnet form hadn't been used much since Shakespeare and Milton until Wordsworth revived it for the Romantic period. Choosing to write his address "To Wordsworth" in the form of a sonnet was therefore no doubt a conscious choice by Shelley, addressing Wordsworth in a form that he had excelled in and made his own. In particular, Wordsworth had written a series of "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty," published in his book Poem, in Two Volumes of 1807, and those sonnets were very important to Shelley as a young poet, because in them Wordsworth expressed his political allegiance to the ideals represented by the French Revolution. "To Wordsworth" is a Shakespearean sonnet, distinguished from the Petrarchan sonnet by the rhyme scheme and location of the volta; all of Shakespeare's sonnets use the following scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEFGG. Shelley adopts this form but alters the final six lines to EEFGFG, with the volta occuring after line 12. The sonnet form lends itself particularly well to argumentative structures; a problem or question is often introduced in the opening lines that is then resolved through the poem's turn. Shelley makes use of this formal ability of the sonnet in "To Wordsworth."
The poem opens with an apostrophic address to Wordsworth as "Poet of Nature." The opening quatrain references Wordsworth's great poem, very important to Shelley, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," where Wordsworth reflects on and mourns the loss of his childlike relation to Nature: "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream." Like Wordsworth, Shelley makes use of the figure of the dream: "Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow, / Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn." While Shelley clearly has the "Intimations" ode in mind here, these are persistent themes in Wordsworth's work, so that these opening lines are a kind condensed summary of Wordsworth's poetry as a whole.
To begin the second quatrain, Shelley, in the kind of plain language that Wordsworth himself utilized in his work, expresses his sympathy with Wordsworth: "These common woes I feel." The use of the word "common" here is a conscious choice by Shelley, and carries with it particular associations. The British Parliament was divided between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, reflecting the strict class divisions within British society as a whole. Wordsworth and Coleridge had, in their major work of 1798, the Lyrical Ballads, attempted to write in "the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society" to express "a natural delineation of human passions." That is, they used ordinary language to try to express ordinary feelings of ordinary people. This in itself was a radical move to make in a book of poetry, and one that Shelley admired. He's expressing a shared solidarity with "the Commons"—everyday working people. But then Shelley introduces a breach between himself and Wordsworth: "One loss is mine / Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore." We're not told what particular "loss" is felt, and it isn't until later that we realize that this loss that Shelley "deplores"—a very strong word to use—is the loss of the Wordsworth that wrote poetry dedicated to "truth and liberty." In effect, these lines introduce a dissonance that isn't resolved until the end of the poem.
In the lines that follow, Shelley constructs two complex similes, which create evocative imagery to express two different sides, or views, of what Wordsworth's poetry meant to him. In the first simile, Wordsworth is like a star that guides a small ship ("bark") through a difficult journey in a winter storm at night. In the simile, Shelley is the ship and the journey can be considered that of life. Like a sailor following the north star to guide them in the right direction, Wordsworth's poetry showed Shelley the way. That Wordsworth is the "lone star" in the sky shows the prominent position he once held for Shelley as a poet worthy of imitation and admiration. Shelley would later use this same image in Adonais, his famous elegy for John Keats (who died in Rome in 1821, while on his way to stay with the Shelleys in Pisa): "my spirit's bark is driven," he writes "Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given," concluding "The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." The second simile expresses something similar, though the particular image brings a different resonance and different connotations. Here, Wordsworth is likened to a refuge or fortress built high up into the rock; there is much danger below from "the blind and battling multitude," but Wordsworth's poetry offers a safe haven, a place to escape from the constant and senseless struggle below. Again, Wordsworth is in a place of prominence, above all others.
The next two lines sum up why Wordsworth was so important to Shelley: "In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty." The phrase "honoured poverty" has two intertwined meanings here. On the one hand, Wordsworth lived a simple life on a relatively modest amount of money. But, like the use of the word "common" earlier in the poem, the "poverty" also refers to Wordsworth's choice to simplify the language of his verse, to use the language of the poor and the workers. For Shelley, both of these choices were honorable. These two lines are a classic example of the way Shelley brilliantly used enjambment, a line-break in the middle of a sentence, in his poetry. "Weave" creates a visual, tactile metaphor for something airy and insubstantial: the voice. It also creates the expectation of a noun such as "tapestries," something that is actually woven, but instead, upsetting the reader's expectations, the noun following the line break is "Songs." Taken literally, this doesn't make much sense, but the metaphor of woven songs gives a sense of the subtle complexity of Wordsworth's poetry. Like a tapestry, it might seem simple on the surface, but when you look up close you realize the remarkable complexity and artistry involved. But weaving was also a common job; handloom weavers were numerous, one of the most common jobs in small towns. "Songs consecrate to truth and liberty" brings to mind, in particular, a series of sonnets published in Wordsworth's book Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and titled "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty." These poems expressed political ideals that Shelley still held and that Wordsworth by 1814 had renounced. As late as 1819, when Shelley wrote his great protest poem, still often quoted today, "The Mask of Anarchy," he was making reference to these sonnets by Wordsworth, showing their enduring important for him.
The final two lines complete the argument and the entire logical structure of the poem: "Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be." These lines show Shelley as a master of syntax, and have an almost epigrammatic density to them. Wordsworth had deserted truth and liberty; his political about-face between his early work and The Excursion was so extreme in Shelley's eyes that he had become like another person, or rather, the Wordsworth that Shelley thought he knew had ceased to exist. (Shelley never met Wordsworth in person; he only knew him through his work.) It isn't until these final two lines that we understand that the loss that Shelley deplores is the loss of Wordsworth himself, the death of the Poet of Nature. The evocation of the "Intimations" ode at the beginning is suddenly cast in a new light: just as the Wordsworth of "Intimations" mourns the loss of his childhood self, Shelley mourns the loss of the Wordsworth that he knew and loved during his youth. To put it colloquially, Shelley says to Wordsworth: "You're dead to me now."
