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Wordsworth's Stone

Tony Harrison

Published 05 March 1999

An original poem

"Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust/of the Bastille I sate in the open sun,/And from the rubbish gathered up a stone,/And pocketed the relic in the guise/Of an Enthusiast"
from The Prelude IX (1805) lines 67-70

I wonder if that bit of stone

that Wordsworth had from the Bastille

ever got itself rethrown

against repressive steel,

Or was it tossed into a lake,

the poet watching from the bank,

seeing what ripples it would make

and go on making while it sank?

Was it that "sacred relic's" fate

to scatter minnows in a moonlit pond

and for a moment help create

the golden whorls of the Beyond?

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