Details

Title

The Poetical Works of Wordsworth

Author

Wordsworth, William

Publication Date

n.d.

Publisher

Ward, Lock & Co.

Place of Publication

London

Collection

Scans provided by and used with permission of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library. From the L.M. Montgomery Collection.

Note

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was a founding poet of the Romantic movement. In this, Montgomery’s copy of his collected works, inscribed in 1897, his works are divided into sections like “Poems Founded on the Affections,” “Poems of the Fancy,” and “Poems of the Imagination.” Montgomery has left brackets, underlines, and comments throughout the volume, and she has commented “Beautiful” in response to a few poems like, “Evening Ode” and “The Pass of Kirkstone.” She has also tucked and pasted in photos of the Lake District that Wordsworth called home, photos of Wordsworth’s grave—which she had visited on her honeymoon in 1911—and newspaper clippings about various Wordsworth publications and topics. Montgomery alluded to Wordsworth multiple times throughout her work, often tucking short (perhaps half-remembered) allusions to his poems throughout commonplace entries in her journals. The works of many of the Romantic poets became a sort of shorthand for Montgomery, and she quoted lines or phrases frequently. But one particular poem of Wordsworths, in this volume on page 313, became a frequent touchstone for her. Montgomery referenced his “Ode: Intimations on Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” multiple times. Montgomery has underlined the first and the last lines of the poem (read the full text of the poem here). She first mentions this particular Ode in her journal in September of 1894, even before she acquired this volume. Later, this ode supplied the phrase “the glory and the dream,” which she used as the title to Chapter 36 of ’Anne of Green Gables’. Montgomery later cited “the glory and the dream” in other letters and journal entries. On a walk with her friend Nora Lefurgey, in Norval, Ontario in 1932, Montgomery wrote that the pair “discussed every subject on earth from the lightest to the most profound. When we exhausted earth we adventured to the heavens, to the remotest secrets of ‘island universes.’ Sometimes we quoted poetry. Nora would voice the first line of a couplet and I would finish it. Once in this alternate way we recited the whole of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,’ lingering on the lines, ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting etc.’ Our minds seemed to strike sparks from each other. It was so easy to be witty and brilliant. We opened doors of memory long closed. We looked again on faded joys and dim old griefs that had once been agonies.” She recounted this episode again in a letter to George MacMillan, dwelling on the ways the poem reflects the passage of time and the accumulation of memories.

Genre

poetry

Type of Item

association