Note 337 — 1787

The only justification for republishing this sonnet is that it is the earliest authoritative record of Wordsworth’s attempts in Verse. It is a much more authentic one than the Extract from the conclusion of a Poem, composed in anticipation of leaving School, or than the lines Written in very early Youth, and beginning

Wordsworth dated the former of these poems 1786, but I do not believe that he wrote that poem, and still less that he wrote “Calm is all nature,” etc., as we now have it, in that year. Doubtless he wrote verses on these two subjects; but the best evidence against the notion that the text, as we now have it, was written in 1786, is this 1787 sonnet on Miss Maria Williams. It is not only dated authoritatively, but it was published in 1787; and therefore serves (as nothing else can until we come to 1793) as evidence in regard to the development of his poetic power. The translation of Francis Wrangham’s lines—which he called The Birth of Love—in 1795, is further evidence in the same direction. No doubt there were many poor poetic utterances by Wordsworth later in life—failures in his manhood, as dismal as the “Walford Tragedy” was in his youth—but I think that the Lines written in very early Youth, and the Extract from the Poem composed in anticipation of leaving School, were rehandled by him, and the text greatly improved before they were first published. The late Mr. J. Dykes Campbell wrote to me in 1892: “Poets tell dreadful fibs about their early verses—as witness S.T.C. who declared he wrote The Advent of Love at fifteen! I know he didn’t, and am going to print one or two of his prize school verses of that age, which I have found in his own fifteen-year-old fist.”—Ed.