‘ To the River Otter ’ Dear native brook ! wild streamlet of the West ! How many various-fated years have passed , What happy and what mournful hours , since last I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast , Numbering its light leaps ! Yet so deep impressed Sink the sweet scenes of childhood , that mine eyes I never shut amid the sunny ray , But straight with all their tints thy waters rise , Thy crossing plank , thy marge with willows grey , And bedded sand that , veined with various dyes , Gleamed through thy bright transparence ! On my way , Visions of childhood ! oft have ye beguiled Lone manhood ’ s cares , yet waking fondest sighs : Ah ! that once more I were a careless child !
Other examples of the archetype include Coleridge ’ s sonnet ‘ On Quitting School ’, and ‘ Ode on Quitting School for Jesus College ’, but traces of the genre can be found in the more famous conversation poems ‘ To the Nightingale ’, and ‘ Frost at Midnight ’. And finally , in The Brook , a sonnet sequence never completed , Coleridge left a paradoxical masterpiece of the genre in which he specialised , the genre of the planned but never produced .
What of Wordsworth ? Crossing London Bridge , he was so struck by the Bowles sonnets that he delayed his friends whilst he sat down in a niche of the bridge and read the volume from cover to cover . Composing sonnets at picturesque spots , especially with ruins , is subsequently commonplace in his work , and probably owes its origin to Bowles more than to anyone else . Examples include ‘ There is a Little Unpretending Rill ’ ( 1801-02 ),‘ Brook ! Whose Society The Poet Seeks ’ ( prior to 1804 ),‘ To the River Derwent ’ ( 1802 ), and To the River Duddon ( first published in 1807 , and completed in 1820 ). But above all the pattern may be discerned in ‘ Tintern Abbey ’ ( 1798 ), with its abbey ruins , riparian setting , and inter-minglings of time :
Five years have past ; five summers , with the length Of five long winters ! and again I hear These waters , rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur . – Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliff …
And now , with gleams of half-extinguished thought , With many recognitions dim and faint , And somewhat of a sad perplexity , The picture of the mind revives again : While here I stand , not only with the sense Of present pleasure , but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food .
With its clear structure of past , present , and future , the poem shows the influence of the genre , if also providing a touchstone for Bowles ’ s inferiority .
There had to be a naysayer , and in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ( 1809 ), Byron stylishly supplied :
Hail , Sympathy ! thy soft idea brings A thousand visions of a thousand things , And shows , still whimpering thro ’ threescore of years , The maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers . And art thou not their prince , harmonious Bowles ! Thou first , great oracle of tender souls ? Whether thou sing ’ st with equal ease , and grief , The fall of empires , or a yellow leaf ; Whether thy muse most lamentably tells What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells , Or , still in bells delighting , finds a friend In every chime that jingled from Ostend ; Ah ! how much juster were thy Muse ’ s hap , If to thy bells thou would ’ st but add a cap ! Delightful Bowles ! still blessing and still blest , All love thy strain , but children like it best .
Tintern Abbey : The Crossing and Chancel , Looking towards the EastWindow , by JMW Turner , 1794 . Photo © Tate ; licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 ( Unported ).
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