So much must have been clear from what he told her and from those garrulous and rather illiterate letters. And so she took upon herself most of the burden of that strange romance, wrote affectionate letters full of tender inquiries for the child, went with her brother on that curious visit to Calais in , when they passed a whole month with Annette and the child.
How that month was spent, how its daily difficulties were overcome, we do not know; but there was no bitterness any more and the two families, suddenly and dramatically linked in a moment of revolutionary ardor, remained friendly and affectionate.
She rescued her brother from an entanglement, not an embrace. She rescued him, not for herself, but for Mary Hutchinson, whom he married immediately after this Calais visit. Now he would be complete; he would have the delights of married life, the joy of children, without losing the spiritual understanding which she alone could give him.
It is in some ways an affront to set these things down on paper. They were not precisely reasoned and coldly calculated. She felt them to be right: she moved towards them in her wild affectionate way, carrying her brother with her. It is idle and unprofitable to speculate what course he would have pursued without her: he might after all, with his high standards of morality, have married Annette. He might, on the other hand, in his tough matter-of-fact way, have driven the whole incident out of his mind.
What is certain is that it is utterly ridiculous to picture Wordsworth as heartlessly scheming to abandon Annette, confer marriage with an air of patronage upon Mary, and enslave his sister to his selfishness. Dorothy understood these things better than he did and, even if she brought them to an issue which suited him, it suited all the actors in this drama too, and it suited the world, which might otherwise have lost the fruits of his great spirit. With Coleridge the problem was different.
He and Dorothy liked each other from the moment he came running across the field and into their house at Racedown, eager, enthusiastic, unannounced. She liked him for the freedom of his talk and his boyish spirits.
She liked him because he admired and encouraged her brother. He liked her for her sensitive perceptions, her ready sympathy, her natural eager demeanor —so utterly different from the shallow, contained, conventional, fussy attitude of his wife. But he did not precisely compare her with his wife; he did not think of her in those terms. She was a companion, bright, amusing, sympathetic, high-spirited, sensitive; she was a link with Wordsworth, of whom in the ardor of his admiration he stood a little in awe.
She interpreted the one to the other, not consciously or deliberately, but by understanding both she realized the harmony of their thought and feeling. Perhaps she did, but the physical attraction, if it existed at all, was not so strong as to make all other communion painful and impossible.
She continued to love and serve Coleridge, as she loved and served her brother, and in equal measure and in the same kind they returned her love. Coleridge was not happily married.
He had chosen badly, if indeed he had chosen at all; for the choice had perhaps been made as much by Southey as himself. His marriage was never a passionate romance, and of spiritual and intellectual companionship there was little. Coleridge was not in the mood at Racedown to look upon Miss Wordsworth and, feeling that he had made a bitter mistake, long for what he could not have.
He was, however, surprised and delighted by a form of companionship which he had never imagined, and in the months that followed at Alfoxden and Nether Stowey he and Dorothy spent many enchanted hours alone together or in the company of Wordsworth, whom they equally honored and loved. She did not believe her husband was in love in the ordinary sense, and she was right.
What she resented at first and continued to resent for many years was the encouragement which she felt her husband received from the Wordsworths in his waywardness, his incompetence, his self-indulgences.
There she was wrong. If the paths of Wordsworth and Coleridge had never crossed, the pitiable decline of Coleridge would have begun much earlier, there would have been no Ancient Mariner , no Christabel , and no Kubla Khan.
It was William - - after our first joy was over we got some tea. Before William is back, Dorothy is in a state of melancholy sometimes cf. Dorothy started to write her diary on 14 May When Dorothy moved to live at Dove Cottage in Grasmere together with William, a highly productive period started for her brother. Dorothy wrote her journal for a period of three years.
For her writings she used five notebooks, one of which has been lost through the years. The first notebook dates from 14 May to 22 December The third notebook dates from 10 October to 14 February The fourth notebook covers the period between 14 February to 2 May and the fifth and last notebook of the ones forming the Grasmere Journal dates from 14 May to 16 January The reasons to write the journal are clear-cut to Dorothy.
On 10 June , a Tuesday, Dorothy describes a begging situation from 27 May. Dorothy wants to pass by the two boys. They begin to beg and whine but Dorothy claims that she has already given their mother something to eat. Just few of the facts, that Dorothy had noted in , are changed or left out by her brother. Although no evidence has been found that William later on really used the set down story of the turtle doves, we can guess that he intended to do so.
This little anecdote proves that Dorothy was a help for William in this part of his work, as well. One can say that Dorothy did some of the preparatory work for William.
The following four lines mark the beginning of the probably most famous poem ever written by William Wordsworth Wordsworth : I wandered lonely as a cloud. Dorothy Wordsworth and her influence on the life and work of William Wordsworth with particular emphasis on the "Grasmere Journal " Seminar Paper, 14 Pages, Grade: 1,3. H G Hendrik Geisler Author. Add to cart. She is remembered for her delightful diaries, which were not published until years after her death.
At the end of she and William settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Dorothy was a year or so younger than William. Their parents had died when they were children and they were extremely close. She had no money and no income, and the pair of them ate cheaply and begged their friends for cast-off clothes. Now in her thirties, with grey eyes and bad teeth, she was short and wiry, tanned from much time outdoors, an unconventional person who took long walks in the country by herself, enjoyed chatting with passing tramps and did the wash on Sundays.
Dorothy never married and remained a full, hard-working member of the household when William married Mary Hutchinson in Dorothy was then thirty-one and had decided that she was far too old to think of marriage for herself.
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