William Wordsworth

It was whilst living in Dove Cottage that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote much of his greatest poetry and his sister Dorothy kept her Grasmere Journals. In the early nineteenth century their home was frequented by some of British Romanticism's key writers, poets and artists

Wordsworth was born in 1770. He lived for eighty years, produced some of English poetry’s greatest works and influenced future generations of poets. Most of his life was spent in the Lake District. He was born in Cockermouth (a town in the northern Lakes); educated at Hawkshead Grammar school; and spent much of his adult life in Grasmere and Rydal, right in the heart of the Lake District.

Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount in 1850, and is buried, with his family, in Grasmere churchyard. During his life he was witness to great social, political and artistic change and his experiences and attitudes are reflected not only in his poetry, but also in letters and prose works.

Place and family were also important to Wordsworth. This is clear in his abiding love of the Lake District and settled domestic life, celebrated in poems such as Home at Grasmere.

Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum & Art Gallery give a unique insight into the way Wordsworth worked: where his ideas came from, his use of notebooks, the making of fair copies and the continuous correction and reworking of poems.

 

Wordsworth's most famous poem about daffodils was composed in 1804, two years after he saw the flowers while walking by Ullswater on a stormy day with Dorothy, his sister. His inspiration for the poem came from an account written by Dorothy.

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

Published in Collected Poems, 1815