On Lyrical Ballads

Oh god, this collection was such a delight, and I can’t believe it took me so long to read it. I’d read some of the poems for courses in high school and university, but never the whole thing. It’s bookended by “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” probably the two greatest poems in it, though the whole is wonderful. I read all of it out loud, afraid I’d miss the rhythm and pacing if I read silently as I usually do, and I’m glad I did — the poems are essentially music. Most are in iambic tetrameter, with some deviation: “The Convict” uses unusual anapests that give it extra weight by inverting the classical Greek dactyl, a sound something like duh-duh-DAH duh-duh-DAH duh-duh-DAH, where most of the poems lean on the iamb, duh-DAH duh-DAH duh-DAH duh-DAH.

Wordsworth and Coleridge say in the introduction that the poems were meant to speak to the everyday experience of the English people through a form that had until then belonged to the wealthy and the so-called sophisticated. So they paint tableaux of the English countryside, tell the stories of women whose husbands have left them or — by rumor — killed their child, share the grief of sailors lost at sea, and recount the shepherd who was rich in sheep and lost them all. Many have a darker side, though not all, and for all their trials they seem to leave a sense of inner peace. To date this is probably my favorite poetry collection of all time.