The Duddon Sonnets - Notes to Sonnet VI

VI. FLOWERS

          ERE yet our course was graced with social trees

          It lacked not old remains of hawthorn bowers,

          Where small birds warbled to their paramours;

          And, earlier still, was heard the hum of bees;

          I saw them ply their harmless robberies,

          And caught the fragrance which the sundry flowers,

          Fed by the stream with soft perpetual showers,

          Plenteously yielded to the vagrant breeze.

          There bloomed the strawberry of the wilderness;

          The trembling eyebright showed her sapphire blue,           10

          The thyme her purple, like the blush of Even;

          And if the breath of some to no caress

          Invited, forth they peeped so fair to view,

          All kinds alike seemed favourites of Heaven.

If the previous sonnet was reminiscent of Lyrical Ballads, then this seems to hark back to Wordsworth’s earliest poetry found in An Evening Walk, which is much more ‘Augustan’ in tone.

Lines such as:

And caught the fragrance which the sundry flowers,

Fed by the stream with soft perpetual showers,

Plenteously yielded to the vagrant breeze.

are generalised and rely on well-established poetic phrasing – ‘sundry flowers’, ‘perpetual showers’, ‘vagrant breeze’, for example.

There is a studied grace to these which is reminiscent of mid-eighteenth century poetry. The pastoralism of James Thompson’s ‘The Seasons’ springs to mind:

Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around. 

Full swell the woods"; their every music wakes,

Mixed in wild concert with the warbling brooks

Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,

And hollow lows responsive from the vales,

Spring, The Seasons (1730) ll. 196 - 200