Yarrow Revisited

The Volume is in Excellent Condition with protective case, bound in publisher’s brown paper boards, with a paper label on the spine: Externally the boards and spine are lightly scuffed in general, with the worn hinges reinforced, and with the board corners bumped. Internally the leaves are generally clean and amply margined, the leaves being uncut, with some mild marginal staining, occasional mild foxing, and mild toning near the edges. The Volume is Complete in All Respects With half-title, final advertisement, and very scarce errata slip before the contents, in addition to the errata on the verso of Pp. xv.

William Wordsworth is one of the earliest of the English Romantic Poets. Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as “the poem to Coleridge”. Wordsworth was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

In 1803 Wordsworth, who with his sister was making a pedestrian tour in the Border Country, reluctantly gave up a projected excursion to the Valley of the Yarrow. Hence a poem entitled “Yarrow Unvisited”. In 1814 under the guidance of the Scottish poet Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, he visited the Yarrow, and this poem, first published in 1815, is the result. In 1831 Wordsworth again visited the same scene, and commemorates the occasion in a third poem “Yarrow Revisited”. The Yarrow is the scene of various poems, for example “The Braes of Yarrow”, and these had already given to Wordsworth an imaginative picture, and interest in the locality.