ABSTRACT
During Wordsworth's early years at Dove Cottage, he was much taken up with a study of the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poets whose works were conveniently extracted in Robert Anderson's Poets of Great Britain, published in 1795. At the core of this poem is one of the most mighty of all Wordsworth's comparisons. The Cyclopean daisy was primarily playful, though it had a serious point to make. The domestic atmosphere of the second stanza comes as a relaxation after the sustained tension and release of the first. Geoffrey Durrant has made an eloquent case for the more elaborate four-stanza version of the poem published in 1815. The first line of 'Louisa' was actually replaced in 1836 by a very badly conceived revision, but Wordsworth thought better in 1845. A much later sonnet, dating probably from 1826, and published as a dedicatory poem prefixed to the Miscellaneous Sonnets in 1827, begins with nine lines summing up Wordsworth's formal desideratum.
