‘To Wordsworth’, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

William Wordsworth, by Benjamin Robert Haydon, oil on canvas,1842.

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
Is Shelley praising or criticising Wordsworth?
Written by Shelley as a sad retort to learning that Wordsworth, known for his poetry written for the average person and using everyday language, had been officially appointed as Britain's poet laureate: a poisition that Shelley saw as compromised all that he had previously championed. A poet laureate is an official appointment by a government to compose poems for state occasions and other government events, which was to Shelley, who say Wordsworth as the "Poet of Nature", an unforgivable and hypocritical desertion from everything he had previously stood for: "In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty".

Shelly describes his feelings towards this news using phrases "wept to know", "leaving thee to mourn", "thou leavest me to grieve", leaving the reader in no doubth that he is truly upset by Wordsworth's appointment.

He opens the poem by stating that Wordsworth has mourned the loss of "Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow", and he compares his feelings of loss to this. Wordsworth's pure poetry was like a "...lone star, whose light did shine... in winter's midnight...", and as "a rock-built refuge" that "stood above the blind and battling multitude" that is society.

Shelley concludes the poem by stating that Wordsworth, having bee the 'Poet of Nature' and deserting all he stood for, should cease to be a poet at all.