“Thou Eglantine, so bright with sunny showers,
  Proud as a rainbow spanning half the vale, [3]
  Thou one fair shrub, oh! shed thy flowers,
  And stir not in the gale. 40
  For thus to see thee nodding in the air,
  To see thy arch thus stretch and bend,
  Thus rise and thus descend,—­
  Disturbs me till the sight is more than I can bear.”

  The Man who makes this feverish complaint 45
  Is one of giant stature, who could dance
  Equipped from head to foot in iron mail. 
  Ah gentle Love! if ever thought was thine
  To store up kindred hours for me, thy face
  Turn from me, gentle Love! nor let me walk 50
  Within the sound of Emma’s voice, nor [4] know
  Such happiness as I have known to-day.

* * * * *

VARIANTS ON THE TEXT

[Variant 1: 

1836.

...  Ye leaves, When will that dying murmur be suppress’d?  Your sound my heart of peace bereaves, It robs my heart of rest. 1800.]

[Variant 2: 

1800.

  ... yon ...  MS.]

[Variant 3: 

1836.

  Thou Eglantine whose arch so proudly towers
  (Even like a rainbow ... 1800.

  ... the rainbow ... 1802.

The text of 1815 returns to that of 1800.]

[Variant 4: 

1836.

  ... or ... 1800.]

If the second, third, and fourth stanzas of this poem had been published without the first, the fifth, and the last, it would have been deemed an exquisite fragment by those who object to the explanatory preamble, and to the moralising sequel.  The intermediate stanzas suggest Burns’s

  ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,
    How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair! 
  How can ye chant, ye little birds,
    An’ I sae weary, fu’ o’ care!’

and Browning’s ‘May and Death’: 

  ’I wish that when you died last May,
    Charles, there had died along with you
  Three parts of spring’s delightful things;
    Ay, and, for me, the fourth part too.’

This mood of mind Wordsworth appreciated as fully as the opposite, or complementary one, which finds expression in the great ’Ode, Intimations of Immortality’ (vol. viii.), l. 26.

  ‘No more shall grief of mine the season wrong,’

and which Browning expresses in other verses of his lyric, and repeatedly elsewhere.  The allusion in the last stanza of this poem is to Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy.—­Ed.

* * * * *

THE CHILDLESS FATHER

Composed 1800.-Published 1800 [A]

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere.  When I was a child at Cockermouth, no funeral took place without a basin filled with sprigs of boxwood being placed upon a table covered with a white cloth in front of the house.  The huntings on foot, in which the old man is supposed to join as here described, were of common, almost habitual, occurrence in our vales when I was a boy, and the people took much delight in them.  They are now less frequent.—­I.F.]