Dorothy Wordsworth: Sister and Poet
from herself. Her reticence is evident in the third person voice she adopts in her early entries. This reserve may be due to a lack of confidence and, in part, to the fact that she shared her journals with her brother. In the first entry of her Grasmere journal (May 14th, 1800), she acknowledges that she writes because her words "shall give Wm. pleasure...when he comes home again" (37).
It may be argued that since many of the entries are written with such care and poetic concerns, Dorothy's writing provided personal satisfaction to herself as well. She plays with the sounds of words and the effects these sounds elicit, almost as if she were writing formal poetry. Alliteration and assonance lend a musical quality to her February 10th entry. The first line reads, "Walked to the Woodlands, and to the waterfall." The repeated w sounds give way to her next sentence, which ends: "low damp dell." Here, not only does she play with the d and l sounds, but dell and fall function as slant rhymes. The next sentence reads: "These plants now in perpetual motion from the current of the air." Note reoccurring p sound in plants and perpetual and the internal r sounds in perpetual, current, and air. Read together, these three lines might easily comprise a poem's tercet.
Her perspective (dare I say, spontaneously?) sweeps from the near to the far without missing a beat. She can observe a heath, the motions of the grass, and the "waving of the spiders' threads," and then sweep her gaze across to contemplate the distant sky and cliffs: "On our return the mist still hanging over the sea, but the opposite coast clear, and the rocky cliffs distinguishable." Likewise, she begins afar and swoops down to earth: "Venus first showing herself between the struggling clouds; afterwards Jupiter appeared. The hawthorn hedges, black and pointed, glittering with millions of diamond drops." And later in the same entry, observations stretch across the land and return to the sky and everything, earth and sky, appear connected: "...the hollies shining with broader patches of light. The road to the village of Holford glittered like another stream." The repetition of glitter connects hawthorn hedges to the light of hollies and to the road. Heaven and earth mirror and illuminate one another in Dorothy's language.
Obviously, William was not the only gifted writer in the family. It is interesting
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