"The innocent children were buried seven or eight layers deep"

[larryhammer]

Opening of The Prelude, draft of 1805:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city's walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchised and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.

Opening of the version published in 1850:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while he fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy he brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er his mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.

Some revisions were good: compressing out a line tightened it up, and the address to the wind had to go. Replacing the metaphoric imprisonment with the vague but more honest "vast city" was also probably the right choice. And over the years, Wordsworth learned a thing or two about losening up his meter, making it more muscular.

And yet. And yet. The first has a more inviting voice. The final version's diction, with "doth" and "visitant" and "whate'er" (can't ding him on "yon" as that was already there), and the stiff formality of "none more grateful than to me" and the like are not improvements. Nor is replacing compound concretes with a few abstracts. Admittedly, the bird is more concrete than a habitation, but it's a bland detail and we lose the nice glance at Shakespeare. The repeat of "breeze" clunks as well, and shifting its pronoun from "it" to "he" is, um, well. Yeah.

Just from this sample, it looks like a classic case of editing the life out.

---L.

Comments

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

To me, "a discontented sojourner" clashes with "where I long had pined"; the whole point of a sojourn is it's a temporary stay. I definitely prefer "it beats against my cheek, and seems half-conscious of the joy it gives" to the revision. I also like "May fix my habitation where I will" much better—it has power, it emphasizes that he can do something, where the revision is passive, it shifts the emphasis from the verb to the adjective, and changes the verb from the strong "fix" to the weaker infinitive "to settle".

[larryhammer]

Exactly. And good point about the long sojourner -- the phrase bothered me but I couldn't put my finger on why.

---L.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I was the TA for a class in which we read both the 1850 and 1805 Preludes in a facing-page edition. All the changes are like that -- it's a book that Wordsworth never should have edited.

[larryhammer]

I think I'm reading that edition -- the one from Penguin?

The 1798 two-part version (which I just read in the Wordsworth & Wordsworth collection) was good, but I can see why he wanted to expand it. Now I want to compare the five-part version of 1804 to 1805, to see which is better.

---L.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure it was a Penguin, yes.