XXX
WHO swerves from innocence, who makes
divorce
Of that serene companion--a good
name,
Recovers not his loss; but walks with
shame,
With doubt, with fear, and haply with
remorse:
And oft-times he--who,
yielding to the force
Of chance-temptation, ere his journey
end,
From chosen comrade turns, or
faithful friend--
In vain shall rue the broken
intercourse.
Not so with such as loosely wear the
chain
That binds them, pleasant River! to
thy side:-- 10
Through the rough copse wheel thou
with hasty stride;
I choose to saunter o'er the grassy
plain,
Sure, when the separation has been
tried,
That we, who part in love,
shall meet again.
The basic idea behind this is simple
enough. The letter part of the sonnet compares being temporarily separated from
those you love to leaving the river to ‘wheel’ through a rough copse while the
wanderer ‘saunters over a grassy plain’, certain that they shall meet again.
This is contrasted with the fate of those who are in disgrace or estranged from
a chosen companion.
Where I’m not certain of the precise
meaning of this is in the phrase ‘such as loosely wear the chain that binds
them’. Is the inference that even when parted from the river, then in some way
the poet is still bound to it, so, in ‘parting in love’, you are assured to
meet again?
Given the words addressed to
Coleridge in the postscript to the sonnet series, so, carefully worded as to
make clear that there was no intention to plagiarise Coleridges planned poem
‘The Brook’, is it possible that Wordsworth had in mind the fractious
relationship between the two poets which had occurred over the previous decade
or so.
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