The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth

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THE POEM

  At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
  Hangs a Thrush [1] that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
  Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
  In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

  ’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees 5
  A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
  Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
  And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

  Green pastures she views [A] in the midst of the dale,
  Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; 10
  And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,
  The one only [2] dwelling on earth that she loves.

  She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
  The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
  The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, 15
  And the colours have all passed away from her eyes! [3]

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VARIANTS ON THE TEXT

[Variant 1:

1820.

There’s a Thrush ... 1800.]

[Variant 2:

1802.

The only one ... 1800.]

[Variant 3: The following stanza, in the edition of 1800, was omitted in subsequent ones:

    Poor Outcast! return—to receive thee once more
    The house of thy Father will open its door,
    And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,
    May’st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. [i]]

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FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A: Wordsworth originally wrote “sees.” S.T.C. suggested “views.”—Ed.]

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SUB-FOOTNOTE ON VARIANT 3

[Sub-Footnote i:

“Susan stood for the representative of poor ‘Rus in urbe.’ There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten; ‘bright volumes of vapour,’ etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan’s moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her ‘a poor outcast’ seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express.”

Charles Lamb to Wordsworth. See ‘The Letters of Charles Lamb’, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i., p. 287.—Ed.]

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1798