Today’s poem reminds us how much is sometimes riding on the proper grammatical distinctions.
Born in Cumberland, British Romantic poet and prose writer Dorothy Wordsworth was the third of five children. Her mother died when Wordsworth was six, and she moved to Halifax to live with her aunt. In 1781 she enrolled in Hipperholme Boarding School. When her father died in 1783, the family’s financial situation worsened and the children were sent to live with their uncles. Wordsworth changed schools, entering Miss Medlin’s school, where she first read Milton, Shakespeare, and Homer. She later moved to live with an uncle in Penrith, where she was tutored by yet another uncle, the Reverend William Cookson, who also tutored the sons of King George III. Starting in 1788, Wordsworth lived with Cookson and his new wife, and helped to care for their children.
She remained particularly close to her brother, the poet William Wordsworth, and the siblings lived together in Dorset and Alfoxden before William married her best friend, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802. Thereafter Dorothy Wordsworth made her home with the couple.
An avid naturalist, Wordsworth enjoyed daily nature walks with her brother, and images from the notes she took of these walks often recur in her brother’s poems. Most of her writing explores the natural world.
Although Wordsworth did not publish her work, many of her journals, travelogues, and poems have been posthumously collected and published, including her four-volume Alfoxden journal, which she kept from May 1799 to December 1802, and her journals from 1824 to 1835, which include a travelogue and notes on life at Rydal Mount, where she lived with William and his family beginning in 1813. Wordsworth also wrote several children’s stories.In her later years, she struggled with addictions to opium and laudanum, and her mental health deteriorated. Until his death in 1850, her brother was her main caretaker.
-bio via Poetry Foundation
Christine Perrin's "Reading Telemachus"
The Saint Crispin's Day Speech
Carl Sandburg's "Mummy"
"The Death of Nelson"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Tide Rises, Tide Falls"
Dana Gioia's "Metamorphosis"
Two by Oscar Wilde
Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars"
Theodore Roethke's "Root Cellar"
J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Tale of Tinuviel"
Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
Rudyard Kipling's "If"
Jane Kenyon's "The Blue Bowl"
T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"
Thomas Gray's "Ode to the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes"
Pablo Neruda's "A Dog Has Died"
Blaise Cendrars "Menus"
Roald Dahl's "The Centipede's Song"
T.S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats"
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