Lord Byron was the hot, trendy poet who could afford to mock poor William Wordsworth and his Lake Country set. Byron was young, splendid, and “naughty.” Like Bill Clinton, Byron knew how to stage a scandal that hurt everybody but Byron. Wordsworth was not dashing, more diffident, laboring away on the preface of a great poem he would never finish. Byron took birth and money as his natural due while poor Wordsworth had to work to eat.
And yet of the two, it is the younger man that reads as a man tied most to his era. Byron lived a stagey life that we might marvel at if made into a Byronic movie, but one needs a degree in history to get his sarcasm and soon tires of even Don Juan, his great poem. (“Ha! Sex! Ha! Hypocrite!”) Does this work for hundreds of pages?) Byron hated cant, sanctimonious chatter, and so invented a whole new cant for literary types. He is the father of the effete snob not much given to work, amused by the “sell outs” who served patrons or worked jobs. Byron wanted to live and living apparently meant mocking military heroes, virtues he could not obtain, and using most of the people around him like lace handkerchiefs. He may have been daring in the day, but now he is just a Lit major with a title.
When Byron is good, he is bad, and when he is bad, he is boring.
Wordsworth dared to write poems about daffodils. He was good to his sister and his drug addled friend. I find more interest in Dove Cottage than in Byronic exploits across continents because Wordsworth struggled to know himself, the people around him, and his neighborhood. Wordsworth dared to do what Byron could not have done: grow old. He had dry times when poetry failed, but then would become fecund again. Byron burned up, Wordsworth burned.
He had plenty of passion since after all he wrote this:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Wordsworth understood that artificial things, business, vices, and Byronic self-indlgence obscured the deeper joys and the transcendent beauties.
Byron was a great poet and a little man. Wordsworth became a gentleman and a greater poet. Only a tone deaf man would not enjoy and appreciate Byron’s genius, but only a cad would admire him. Only a fool would not see Wordsworth’s poetic greatness and most of us cannot approach his steadiness, discipline, and moral growth.
And so tonight I am reminded to look at flowers and let irony go. I should love my brother and get to know him better. I must love my wife and do my duty toward her soul. I will find God in the small things. I must not envy the Lord Byron of today, full of Hollywood flash and libertine vigor. They die alone. They are up to date and forever dated. They dally and they dazzle, but are not worth the beauty of a single daffodil.
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