<lux's "the wordsworths: william and dorothy">
2003-05-15.1:34 a.m.


The Wordsworths: William and Dorothy
Thomas Lux


The "New Sensibility" or not
the master and his servant sister
surely knew some guilt for the blot
of sex on their long history.

A bowl of milk, a mutton chop, some bread
and the blazing days at Dove Cottage.
Coleridge: "I wish, I wish I were dead,"
a slob, a slave, in fast dotage

from opium.  These were ecstatics,
more on mountains than on lakes,
who walked and talked all day, frantic
for music, a life in which the stakes

were high: to make it matter more,
the song, to make it matter most.



back /& forth /& frosting
names are often sad