This breeze

Book First of the Prelude (on this windy day, windy enough to force our Leaf caps tighter onto our heads) begins: "O there is blessing in this gentle breeze". The Prelude breeze--not as rough, I suspect, as today's--provides the first-person Sojourner a model of escape from his "vast City". He claims, joyously, that "The earth is all before me", perhaps referring to the 13 Books--or about 250 pages the wind right now wants to free from their binding--after this one.

By line 45 I'm a little tired of this Sojourner voice, although I understand how much he wants to get out of the City to write. What interests me most is Wordsworth's blank verse, which I spent a lot of time working with at Emma Lake and Banff, in my own out-of-City cottages, earlier this summer. Ten syllables per line, beats irregular, unrhymed.

Wordsworth's system allows this: The heavy weight of many a weary day. Instead of: The heavy weight of many weary days and counts harmonious verse (to which our Sojourner looks forward) as four syllables instead of five, the horizon as three instead of four.

Other words like towards (2 syllables, line 67), or memory (2, line 75) or power (1, line 77) could likely give or take a syllable as required.

Such matters would be old hat to the masters, new hat (the Leaf cap Lucy bought me in Toronto) for me with the Stan Still material at Emma and Banff. There the blanking of several poems, but without the Wordworthy caps at the front of every line, seemed a useful editing device, even usefully annoying at times.