The Wordsworths: Memory in Retrospection

    Reading Dorthy and William’s writings together produced an interesting reading experience for me. Dorothy’s writings detail the moments of their everyday lives, such as baking bread, wandering in the woods, sitting on rocks, and engaging in conversation with friends. She seems to be preoccupied with William and his wellbeing. She worries that he gets to bed too late, he is ill, and if he's experiencing a writing-block. Reading William’s poems before Dorothy’s journals was interesting because his attention, in the moments Dorothy describes, is so externally-focused. While Dorothy’s writing is of a more personal nature, William is writing to publish and to create art. This is the primary difference between their writings and is gender-conforming according to the expectations of the time. This difference is interesting to me and makes me think about what it would be like to be the sister of a famous writer.

    He clearly derives inspiration from nature, not people, but Dorothy’s constant doting while he struggles through his poems about their experiences together strikes me as quite a shame. Dorothy, while not outwardly attempting to do anything artistic with her writing, writes well and captures moments quite beautifully. One remains quite clearly in my memory; she describes their return to a familiar spot where William, Coleridge, and herself would lie on sunnier days. She writes, “I sate a while upon my last summers seat the mossy stone— William’s unemployed beside me, & the space between where Coleridge has so often lain. The oak trees are just putting forth yellow knots of leaves. The ashes with their flowers passing away & leaves coming out"(Wordsworth 99). This image is the one that stayed with me when I returned to my memory of what I had read to write this short entry. The weather was terrible that day and these memories of a more pleasant summer remind Dorothy of when she could walk all the way to the foot of the lake in fine weather. She notes how miserable everything looks around her in very early spring— this is what her memory elevates in retrospection. 

    Reading brother and sister's work side by side reveals how their individual memory reshapes their experiences walking or spending time in nature together in different ways. For William, contemplating his walking experiences in retrospection elicits transcendent meaning: the walk becomes meditation and specific details of whom he is with or the weather, disappears. His poems describe abstract, sometimes symbolic, emotional experience, whereas Dorothy’s journals preserve what William’s memory discards. Her personal retrospection elevates nostalgia, the intimate, and specific detail, such as Coleridge’s absence marked by empty space and William’s vacant seat in regard to his impatient, constant pacing. She captures the walk, or experiences along the walk, as it was lived—not as it was interpreted or understood later. There is artistry and value in this kind of writing as well. For Dorothy, memory preserves her experience in terms of her relationship to everything around her, especially William, whose struggle she witnesses and captures dutifully.