* * * * *

FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A:  Compare Milton’s phrase in ‘Paradise Regained’ (book iv. l. 220): 

      ’The childhood shews the man,
  As morning shews the day.’

Dryden’s ‘All for Love’, act IV. scene I: 

  ‘Men are but children of a larger growth.’

And Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’, Ep. iv. l. 175: 

  ‘The boy and man an individual makes.’

Also Chatterton’s ‘Fragment’ (Aldine edition, vol. 1. p. 132): 

  ‘Nature in the infant marked the man.’

Ed.]

  “March 26, 1802.—­While I was getting into bed he” (W.) “wrote ’The
  Rainbow.’”

  “May 14th.—...  William very nervous.  After he was in bed, haunted
  with altering ‘The Rainbow.’”

(Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal.) This poem was known familiarly in the household as “The Rainbow,” although not printed under that title.  The text was never changed.

In ‘The Friend’, vol. i. p. 58 (ed. 1818), Coleridge writes: 

“Men laugh at the falsehoods imposed on them during their childhood, because they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the past in the present, and so to produce that continuity in their self-consciousness, which Nature has made the law of their animal life.  Men are ungrateful to others, only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness.  They exist in fragments.”

He then quotes the above poem, and adds: 

“I am informed that these lines have been cited as a specimen of despicable puerility.  So much the worse for the citer; not willingly in his presence would I behold the sun setting behind our mountains....  But let the dead bury their dead!  The poet sang for the living....  I was always pleased with the motto placed under the figure of the rosemary in old herbals: 

    ‘Sus, apage!  Haud tibi spiro.’”

Compare the passage in ‘The Excursion’ (book ix. l. 36) beginning: 

  ’...  Ah! why in age
  Do we revert so fondly, etc.’

also that in ‘The Prelude’ (book v. l. 507) beginning: 

  ‘Our childhood sits.’

* * * * *

WRITTEN IN MARCH, WHILE RESTING ON THE BRIDGE AT THE FOOT OF BROTHERS WATER

Composed April 16, 1802.—­Published 1807

[Extempore.  This little poem was a favourite with Joanna Baillie.—­I.F.]

One of the “Poems of the Imagination.”—­Ed.

  The Cock is crowing,
    The stream is flowing,
    The small birds twitter,
    The lake doth glitter,
  The green field sleeps in the sun; 5
    The oldest and youngest
    Are at work with the strongest;
    The cattle are grazing,
    Their heads never raising;
  There are forty feeding like one! 10