The Book of Birds: Wordsworth's Poetry on Birds

By William Wordsworth

This beautiful pocket-sized volume is a compilation of William Wordsworth’s poetry on birds. The collection includes lyrical, melancholic poems alongside whimsical pieces that will make readers’ heart’s soar.

With themes of freedom, hope and love in The Book of Birds Wordsworth uses darker imagery to express his innermost thoughts and views of the world through the beautiful imagery of birds. This carefully curated book collates some of the poet’s most inspiring work as well as a few of his seminal pieces.

This collection includes fantastic poems such as:

- The Green Linnet

- To a Sky-lark, 1807

- To the Cuckoo

- The Sparrow’s Nest

- A Wren’s Nest

- Animal Tranquillity and Decay

- The Contrast – The Parrot and the Wren

Proudly republished by Read & Co. Books Ragged Hand, Wordsworth’s Poetry on Birds is now in a new compact, pocket-sized edition. This collection is completed by an introductory excerpt from Reminiscences, 1881, by Thomas Carlyle, and would make the perfect gift for lovers of birds and collectors of Wordsworth’s poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ragged Hand - Read & Co.
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528789394

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth, in the English Lake District, the son of a lawyer. He was one of five children and developed a close bond with his only sister, Dorothy, whom he lived with for most of his life. At the age of seventeen, shortly after the deaths of his parents, Wordsworth went to St John’s College, Cambridge, and after graduating visited Revolutionary France. Upon returning to England he published his first poem and devoted himself wholly to writing. He became great friends with other Romantic poets and collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads. In 1843, he succeeded Robert Southey as Poet Laureate and died in the year ‘Prelude’ was finally published, 1850.

Book preview

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THE BOOK

OF BIRDS

WORDSWORTH'S

POETRY ON BIRDS

By

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Copyright © 2020 Ragged Hand

This edition is published by Ragged Hand,

an imprint of Read & Co. 

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

William Wordsworth

THE GREEN LINNET.

TO A SKY-LARK, 1807.

TO A SKYLARK, 1827.

TO THE CUCKOO.

THE SPARROW'S NEST.

A WREN'S NEST.

ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY AND DECAY. A SKETCH.

RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE.

THE CONTRAST — THE PARROT AND THE WREN.

SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF THE BIRD OF PARADISE.

POOR ROBIN.

TO A REDBREAST — IN SICKNESS.

THE REDBREAST.

THE REDBREAST AND THE BUTTERFLY.

HARK! 'TIS THE THRUSH, UNDAUNTED, UNDEPREST.

THE DUNOLLY EAGLE.

EAGLES.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

William Wordsworth

"Mr. Wordsworth . . . had a dignified manner, with a deep and roughish but not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode of speaking.

He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the shelves (for his contemporaries were there also), he sat dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic judgments. . . . Walter Scott said that the eyes of Burns were the finest he ever saw. I cannot say the same