1. My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man:
And I could wish my days to be
Bound to each by natural piety.
--William Wordsworth

3. ROMANTICISM: The Lake Poets
Wordsworth and Coleridge

4. Wordsworth and Coleridge were at the center of a circle of poets and writers referred to as the Lake Poets because of their attachment to England’s Lake District and its natural beauty.

5. The Lake District One of England's Few Mountainous Regions

6. William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, and returned there as adults for peace and inspiration.

7. Coleridge visited Wordsworth often, and at times, lived nearby with his wife.

10. The Friendship
Both men loved poetry, which they discussed enthusiastically.
Both were fierce partisans of the French Revolution in its early days.
Both loved nature, and shared the joy of walking in the hills.

11. Lyrical Ballads (1798) was a joint collection of their works.
Coleridge’s poems celebrate the strange and the exotic.

12. Wordsworth explores the language and experience of common people in natural settings.

13. Both were committed to reaching truths about the human soul deeper than those conventional poetry could express.

14. Later Years
Suffering from neuralgic and rheumatic pains, Coleridge had become addicted to opium, freely prescribed by physicians.
The friendship between the two men broke down by 1810, owing in part to Coleridge’s reliance on painkillers.

15. Wordsworth’s Final Home in the Lake District

16. Coleridge’s Epitaph
'Stop, Christian Passer-by! - Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. - O, lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise - to be forgiven for fame He ask'd for praise - to be forgiven for fame He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!'

17. Tintern Abbey, Wales

20. “A host of golden daffodils . . .”