The attention to detail in Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal offers lyrical
descriptions of everyday life that reads as a catalog of the beauty that
resides in nature. This is especially evident in the passage “The wood rich in
flowers. A beautiful yellow, parish yellow flower. That looked thick and round
and double, and smelt very sweet—I supposed it was ranunculus—crowfoot, the
grassy-leaved rabbit-toothed white flower, strawberries, geranium—scentless violet,
anemones two kinds, orchises, primroses” (342). Dorothy seems to wish to
describe in detail every beautiful thing that she sees in order to cultivate as
accurate a picture of the picturesque beauty of nature.
Also it seems as if
Dorothy strives to record what she experiences in vivid detail in order to
assist her brother William to compose his own poetry. In her Journal she states that she writes her
journal “because I shall give Wm. pleasure by it when he comes home again”
(343). Here we can see that Dorothy wrote in order to please her brother and
gain enjoyment in writing for herself, presumably. Her works do in fact
influence those of William’s, and we can see this in his poem “I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud”. William draws inspiration from Dorothy’s Journal regarding her depictions of the
daffodils but condenses the detailed descriptions of the daffodils that “tossed
and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that
blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing”
(349) into a more poetic and lyrical version that nevertheless loses the vivid
detail present in Dorothy’s version. We can see these differences by looking at
William’s version “A host of dancing daffodils; / along the lake, beneath the
trees, / ten thousand dancing in the breeze” (246). This morphing of Dorothy’s
observations into a poem seems to illustrate how the writing of William’s poems
were a collaborative effort at times, where Dorothy helped to inspire William
with her keen attention to the beauty of the world.
I think it is interesting that Dorothy's writing is -- according to the poem -- truly for enjoyment while most of the women writers we've been concentrating on have written out of necessity. Her poetry seems to have a more calming and content tone than the literature by women in need has been. Perhaps, if she is writing only for enjoyment like she says, we can use the differences in writing styles of the women studied to compare how women in need write versus those who are not.
ReplyDeleteI didn't add this in my own post, but after our class discussion and reading through your post, I've convinced myself that Dorothy and William have an odd relationship. I may not be fully versed in familial relationships of the time period, but I find it so strange that Dorothy writes for her brother's pleasure. After analyzing the similarities and differences between "I wandered lonely as a Cloud" and the journal entry, the use of "I" as opposed to "we" makes the relationship even more bizarre. Dorothy clearly enjoys writing for her brother, and yes, she did gain some fame out of it, but before the fame, what did she gain? To me, it seems like he's taking all the credit for something she saw, or something they both experienced together. It's obvious that they're very close, and I suppose this could be because they live in the middle of nowhere and seriously depend on one another, but there's still something slightly off. I'm not entirely sure what that thing is... but something feels very peculiar...
ReplyDeleteI found that odd as well, that she wrote to please her brother. Once I found out that she was writing for him, and not for herself, it seems as if the great amount of description and detail is forced. I think the journal would sound completely different if she was writing for her own pleasure, not for someone else. This was just how I felt while reading it. And also like you said, it is as if her brother earned his fame through her words. It bothered me how he would do this to his sister, but it bothered me more that she encouraged it by writing these journal entries for him and not herself.
ReplyDeleteI think that it would be interesting to see how different her writing would be if she weren't writing for William. If she were writing for herself would she have been nearly as detailed? It'd be interesting to know if she was so meticulously detailed in general or if it was only because she knew her brother would be using it to create his own works.
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