The Duddon Sonnets - Notes to Sonnet X

X. THE SAME SUBJECT

          NOT so that Pair whose youthful spirits dance

          With prompt emotion, urging them to pass;

          A sweet confusion checks the Shepherd-lass;

          Blushing she eyes the dizzy flood askance;

          To stop ashamed--too timid to advance;

          She ventures once again--another pause!

          His outstretched hand He tauntingly withdraws--

          She sues for help with piteous utterance!

          Chidden she chides again; the thrilling touch

          Both feel, when he renews the wished-for aid:               10

          Ah! if their fluttering hearts should stir too much,

          Should beat too strongly, both may be betrayed.

          The frolic Loves, who, from yon high rock, see

          The struggle, clap their wings for victory!

It is interesting to compare this poem with sonnet VII. Both take youthful love as their theme. However, whereas the earlier sonnet dismissed the foolishness of ‘Stripling’ love through parody, the present sonnet celebrates it in a poem which successfully merges keenly observed human behaviour with a pastoral mode reminiscent, in its final lines especially, of a genre piece by Watteau or Boucher.

Rococo Wordsworth, surely not! What the Duddon series shows is just how versatile a poet Wordsworth is. It is tempting to position him – as the leading philosopher poet of English Romanticism, as a didactic moralist writing poetry of self-improvement, as a writer of pastoral narrative, as the author of the last great epic poems in English Literature, as a theorist who argued for the use of more direct ‘real language’ in poetry – he was, of course all of those things, but he was also an experimentalist, and for that reason even the later Wordsworth remains surprising, as this, much overlooked, sonnet reveals.