¹ The position is admittedly complicated by the naïveté of the old retired mariner who is telling the story. But Wordsworth, after all, wrote it; and even while he uses the device of the mariner as an ironic counterpoise to the tragic madness of the woman, it is transparent enough, surely, to let his own sympathies be evident. In fact, I should say that the mariner represents an attempt on Wordsworth's part to preserve the necessary detachment of the poem. Behind the old man's shocked, and slightly comical, narration, we perceive, and are meant to perceive, the poet's own pity and romantic appreciation of the emotional depths involved.

² The Fenwick Note concerning the experiences behind the poem's composition makes it clear that they were two in number, separated by a considerable time-lapse. The note (given in de Selincourt's edition of the Poetical Works, n, 510) is as follows: “This old man I met a few hundred yards from my cottage at Town-End, Grasmere; and the account of him is taken from his own mouth. I was in the state of feeling described in the beginning of the poem, while crossing over Barton Fell from Mr. Clarkson's, at the foot of Ullswater towards Askam. The image of the hare I then observed on the ridge of the Fell.” We know from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal that she and William, not the poet by himself, met the leech gatherer on 3 Oct. 1800; the poem was written May-July 1802. Thus for the facts; but it is not to the coalescing of the two experiences into one that I wish to draw attention, so much as to the qualitative difference between them.

³ Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, 3 Oct. 1800, gives us a fairly full prose account of the old man as he struck the pair at the time.

⁴ My reading of this stanza might be disputed. Wordsworth's own account of it is found in the 1815 Preface to the Poems (Poetical Works, ed. de Selincourt, ii, 438) : “In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the indication of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in comparison.” With this in mind, I believe the movement of the poet's mind to have been as follows: the old man is first compared to a huge stone on the top of a hill; how the stone arrived there is uncertain, it seems a thing endued with sense, like a sea-beast crawled forth to sun itself. Another interpretation would make the stone-simile and the sea-beast-simile refer equally to the old man. This seems to me to go against Wordsworth's own note, to weaken the meaning, to ignore the cumulative rhythm of the stanza by splitting it into two halves, and to ignore the punctuation—the colon, with its suggestion of carrying on an argument—at the end of the fifth line. Admittedly, Wordsworth's punctuation (never very conventional) is in this poem particularly idiosyncratic; but it is also unusually emphatic. But the most important point is the meaning: how could the old man be directly compared to a sea-beast, without its relevance being first imported into the poem through the stone-simile?

⁵ The last two lines originally ran: “He answer'd me with pleasure and surprize: / And there was, while he spoke, a fire about his eyes.” This, though obviously more Words-worthian, was too tame for the context; one can see why the poet, developing certain hints from the earlier part of the stanza, revised it in so Spenserian a manner.

⁶ For a fuller treatment of the poet's sense of comedy, see John E. Jordan, “Wordsworth's Humor,” PMLA, Lxiii (1958), 81–93.