In the excerpt above, she starts by saying: “Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o’clock. There is always too much, always more than you need, and you have to choose you have to cut a swath through your own experiences, you have to pick your way through the dense underbrush.
When she writes a page of her journal, she is cutting a swath through what is really a bewildering mass of remembered sensations. She does this with a superb economy of means, as these two examples will show: It doesn’t ever intend to be anything more than a journal.Ī lot of her entries begin with a brief impression of the weather. There is a kind of pristine innocence to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. They grow like the flowers she loves to describe. Her descriptions of nature are not planned they just happen. But Dorothy isn’t writing carefully, and that’s part of the charm, the magic of her journal. Someone writing more carefully would have put the sunset earlier in the passage, where it could lead up to the gloomy red of the sea. “The sun gone down” is added as an afterthought, to explain the redness of the sea. The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand on our return of a gloomy red. 23rd-Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o’clock. Wordsworth mentions certain people by name: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others. She was a pathway through which the language developed. Her descriptive prose foreshadows the direction which the English language would take after her. The same can be said of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. William Wordsworth, her brother, revolutionized the language of poetry, and some of his blank verse, which was written two hundred years ago, reads as if it was written yesterday. These passages may seem natural to us, but nothing like them had been seen in English literature before. Nature, to them, was just mud and mosquitoes. In those days, women were not interested in nature. It’s hard for us to appreciate how new this language was in 1798. The purple-starred hepatica spreads itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lengthening their slender stems. Poets had written about nature before, but it hadn’t occurred to them to take the time to observe nature, and to describe it accurately. This strikes a new note in English literature. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. January 20th 1798.-The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. These are the first words she wrote into it: What makes this journal so special? Why do I love it so much? Because it contains some of the finest descriptions of nature in the English language.ĭorothy Wordsworth began her journal at Alfoxden in 1798.
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