A Survey of William Wordsworth's Poetry Quiz

Answer: Lyrical Ballads

"Lyrical Ballads", which bore neither of the poets' names when published, was a central work in the Romantic movement. The collection contains a preface in which Wordsworth discusses the elements of the type of verse that would later come to be called Romantic poetry. It employs the type of language "really used by men" instead of the neo-classical, poetic diction of the verse in fashion in the 18th century.

Wordsworth's "Poems, in Two Volumes" was published in 1807. "The Excursion" was published in 1814.

Answer: cloud

The poem continues:

"When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

Known either by its first line or as "Daffodils", this poem was included in Wordsworth's 1807 collection "Poetry, in Two Volumes". According to Tim Radford in his April 15, 2011 article "Weatherwatch: Dorothy Wordsworth on Daffodils", the poem was inspired when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a long belt of the flowers on a walk on an April day in 1802.

Answer: Duty

This is the opening line to "Ode to Duty", which was included in Wordsworth's "Poetry, in Two Volumes". In the poem, Wordsworth recognizes the value of duty despite his earlier belief in following the heart's spontaneous impulses. He confesses that his lack of a standard sometimes led him astray:

"I, loving freedom, and untried;
No sport of every random gust,
Yet being to myself a guide,
Too blindly have reposed my trust:
And oft, when in my heart was heard
Thy timely mandate, I deferred
The task, in smoother walks to stray;
But thee I now would serve more strictly, if I may."

Answer: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

The verse continues:

"The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."

Included in the 1807 "Poems, Two Volumes", this ode describes the loss of wonder and innocence that comes as we move from childhood into adulthood. "Dejection: An Ode" was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's response to Wordsworth's poem.

Answer: man

In "My Heart Leaps Up," Wordsworth writes:

"The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."

Also known as "The Rainbow", the poem describes the feelings the poet experiences upon beholding a rainbow.

Answer: passion

The poem continues:

"When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon."

Wordsworth wrote this seven-stanza ballad while he was in Germany in 1798, and it was included in the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads". The narrator of the poem is making a night time ride to his beloved's cottage, when he suddenly fears she may be dead.

Answer: Tintern

"Northanger Abbey" is the title of a gothic parody novel by Jane Austen. Wordsworth composed this poem above Tintern Abbey. it begins:

"Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.-Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky."

Wordsworth wrote this poem, with its keen descriptions of the countryside, after a walking tour with his sister. It was included in the 1798 edition of "Lyrical Ballads".

Answer: love

The rhyme scheme of this poem, as is typical of a ballad, is ABCB, so Dove and love rhyme here. The poem continues:

"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
-Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky."

The poem was included in the 1800 edition of "Lyrical Ballads" and is part of the five poems that have come to be known as "The Lucy Poems".

Answer: seal

This is another of Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems". It was written during his travels to Germany with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy. The poem is sometimes titled "A Slumber". It was included in the 1800 edition of "Lyrical Ballads". The poem continues:

"No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees."

Answer: Lucy Gray

According to Mary Moorman in the 1968 "William Wordsworth A Biography", Wordsworth was inspired to write the poem by his sister's recollection of an actual incident that had occurred in Halifax. The poem begins:

"Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray,
And, when I crossed the Wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary Child."

Lucy is warned that a storm is coming:

"To-night will be a stormy night,
You to the Town must go,
And take the lantern, Child, to light
Your Mother through the snow."

Lucy vanishes in the storm:

"They followed from the snowy bank
The footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank,
And further there were none."

She's presumed dead, but some don't agree and imagine her alive, or perhaps a ghost:

"Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living Child,
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome Wild."