Things to Consider:

• French Revolution and English counterrevolutionary measures
• Industrial Revolution and its Consequences
• Use of Language, including common and religious
• Perception and Reality
  
• Choice of Subject
• See Essay 

• What is a lyrical ballad ?
  

• To what degree does this poem portray the characteristics of a lyrical ballad?
  
• Describe the figures of Goody Blake and Harry Gill.
• Which figure is portrayed more sympathetically? Explain.

285:

• What conclusion does the speaker suggest "ye farmers" should draw from the story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill?
  

• What exactly is Wordsworth describing?
• Why do "pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind" (3-4)?
• Explain:  "'Tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes" (11-12).
• Explain:  "I must think, do all I can / That there was pleasure there" (19-20).
• Explain the final four lines (21-24).

• What is Wordsworth's purpose in writing this Preface?
  

• What does Wordsworth mean by "the language really used by men" (305)?
• Why has he selected scenes from "low and rustic life" as his subject?
• Explain:  "In that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature" (305).

306:

• Explain:  "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (306).
• What is a man "possessed of more than usual organic sensibility" (306)?
• Explain:  "Our thoughts . . . are indeed the representations of our past feelings" (306).
• Explain:  "From their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions" (306).
• How is their language "more permanent" and "far more philosophical" than that conventionally used by poets?

• Explain:  "The feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling" (307).

• Why, according to Wordsworth, has he sought to avoid the following devices?
• personification of abstract ideas
• poetic diction
• falsehood of description

• What are "prosaisms"?

• Explain:  "There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition" (309-10).

• What, according to Wordsworth, is a Poet?

• If the language of real men is the absolute standard, why would a Poet need to modify it, as Wordsworth suggests?
• What one restriction, according to Wordsworth, does the Poet face?
• Explain:  "We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure" (311).

• Explain:  "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge" (312).
• Explain:  "The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time" (312).

• Explain what Wordsworth says about differences in "kind" and in "degree" (313).

• What exactly is "emotion recollected in tranquility" (314)?
• Why, according to Wordsworth should the Poet write in meter?
• Why will "painful feeling . . . always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions" (314)?

315:

• Explain:  "We not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased" (315).

• What is the origin of the "wreaths of smoke" Wordsworth describes (18)?

• Explain:  "More like a man / Flying from something he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing he loved" (70-72).

300:

• Explain lines 23-30.
• What does it mean to become a "living soul" (46)?
• What does it mean to "see into the life of things" (49)?

• Explain:  "In this moment there is life and food / For future years" (64-65).
• Explain:  "The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion" (76-77).
• Explain lines 79-84.
• Why are all the "aching joys" (84) of the past all gone?
• Explain lines 89-93.
• Explain lines 93-102.
• What is "the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive" (105-7)?

302:

• Explain:  "In thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart" (116-17).
• Explain:  "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her" (122-23).
• What future does Wordsworth foresee for his sister and her appreciation of nature? How does this relate back to him?

• To what degree does this poem satisfy the poetical requirements Wordsworth sets forth in his Preface? Explain.

• What is a "common" (32)?
• What are "husbandry" and "tillage" (38)?

• What are "Such stores as silent thought can bring" (66)?
• Explain the final four lines (93-96).
• What, if any, is the final moral to this poem?