Chapter 1 - The Death Zone

Summary

This chapter investigates a poem in its markedly different 1811 and 1842 versions: the epistle to Sir George Beaumont, a verse-missive addressed from the Cumbrian coast, where Wordsworth had gone with his family to benefit his children’s health. Supplementing the prose letters that Wordsworth and Beaumont exchanged, it continues a dialogue with his friend and patron. Colloquial and yet structured, it reveals Wordsworth forging verse conditions to reshape the country-house poems developed by Ben Jonson, in which the address of patron by poet had modelled a virtuous sociability exemplified in the moral community of the landed estate. Wordsworth transforms the Jonsonian model so that exemplary community takes the form of intimate, domestic sociability based on the dales family rather than the country house. Modelling chatty friendship and describing family life, his epistle is an alternative to the blank-verse celebration of rustic society that had stalled in ‘Home at Grasmere’ and to the rustic speech that, had formerly narrated the troubles of rural folk. It is a prime example of the ‘new’ later Wordsworth experimenting with a traditional form, and with the comic rather than the egotistical sublime, as he turned away from the solitary communion with nature he had explored in The Prelude.