Poem of the Day: ‘Written in March’ 

In a journal kept in 1798, when she and her famous brother William lived at Alfoxden, in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) recorded a March day spent, as so often, outdoors, with her brother and their neighbor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They had, she wrote, “passed the morning in sauntering about the park and gardens, the children playing about, the old man at the top of the hill gathering furze; interesting groups of human creatures, the young frisking and dancing in the sun, the elder quietly drinking in the life and soul of the sun and air.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850), too, remembered that day. As his “Written in March” makes clear, he observed the same particulars that his sister set down in her account of the day. In fact, the first stanza of his poem — two sets of taut dimeter couplets, with rhymed trimeter in lines five and ten — simply records similar details of life, growth, and energy, in much the same language. In the second stanza, however, the vision opens out onto something larger.