No More Learning

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THE POEM


At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush [1] that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees 5
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views [A] in the midst of the dale,
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; 10
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only [2] dwelling on earth that she loves.

She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, 15
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes! [3]



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VARIANTS ON THE TEXT


[Variant 1:

1820.

There's a Thrush . . . 1800. ]



[Variant 2:

1802.

The only one . . . 1800.
]


[Variant 3: The following stanza, in the edition of 1800, was omitted in
subsequent ones:

Poor Outcast! return--to receive thee once more
The house of thy Father will open its door,
And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,
May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. [i]]



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FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT


[Footnote A: Wordsworth originally wrote "sees. " S. T. C. suggested
"views. "--Ed. ]


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SUB-FOOTNOTE ON VARIANT 3

[Sub-Footnote i:

"Susan stood for the representative of poor '_Rus in urbe_. ' There was
quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten;
'bright volumes of vapour,' etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got
rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral
conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and
contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to
term her 'a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was
no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to
express. "

Charles Lamb to Wordsworth. See 'The Letters of Charles Lamb', edited by
Alfred Ainger, vol.