| Poor Susan | |
| Author: | William Wordsworth |
| Meter: | anapestic tetrameter |
| Wikisource: | Lyrical ballads/Volume 2/Poor Susan |
"Poor Susan" is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth composed at Alfoxden in 1797. It was first published in the collection Lyrical Ballads in 1798. It is written in anapestic tetrameter.
The poem records the memories awakening in a country girl in London on hearing a thrush sing in the early morning.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She seesA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail,And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,The only one dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in Heaven, but they fade,The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,And the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes.
Poor Outcast! return—to receive thee once moreThe house of thy Father will open its door,And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,Mayst hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own.
In Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the poet states:
Charles Lamb objected to the final stanza: According to Ernest de Sélincourt,[1] Wordsworth responded by deleting the stanza in the 1815 edition of his poems and renaming the poem The Reverie of Poor Susan, a title which may have been influenced by his reading Bürger's Des Arme Suschens Traum at Goslar.[2] [3] In addition he replaced the word There's at the beginning of the second line by Hangs and added an introductory note:
However, Peter J. Manning pointed out that: