St John's College: Beginning Poetry Workshop - England, 1788

Dear William Wordsworth,

I really enjoyed your poem! I think you are making a lot of progress this semester, and I am grateful to be assigned as your peer reviewer this week. I like that you write about nature a lot. I am often deeply moved by nature, too. Here are some comments I have on your poem.

Okay, now this is ultimately up to you, but I was thinking for the title, instead of "Unicorn Dream," you could maybe call it something like "Tintern Abbey" or "Lines Composed for Tintern Abbey" or I don't know, maybe even "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of Wye During a Tour." I only say this because the poem seems to be about pensively looking at Tintern Abbey, and while "Unicorn Dream" has a dulcet ring to it, there are no references to a unicorn in your poem. Just a suggestion, though.

I think the beginning's very strong, though a few lines could maybe be improved. The setup for the second section is intriguing, though I think maybe instead of saying "But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have felt sad," you could say something like

"Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: —feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure;"

Those are just some lines off the top of my head, they're probably nothing more than trite drivel, but if you don't feel they convey the speaker's swell of emotions better than the single word "sad," then by all means ignore my suggestion.

I like how you mostly use blank verse in this poem, though I would watch towards the end when you suddenly switch to a brief rhyming pattern in which you try to rhyme "And this green pastoral landscape, were to me/ More dear, both for themselves and for thy pie." Unless the speaker has been suppressing a hilarious Cockney accent for the majority of the poem and cannot help himself at this last line, I don't think this couplet rhyming "me" and "pie" will work. And again, this is another somewhat radical suggestion, but maybe instead of "thy pie" you wrote "thy sake"? It would do away with the rhyming scheme and keep the poem uniformly in blank verse, but also there's no previous mention of the speaker's sister owning a pastry in the poem.

That's it for comments this week! Again, I think you're getting much better. Oh, and one final piece of advice - maybe instead of having your poem written in the shape of an ice cream cone, you could separate it into stanzas and simply number each line. Again, this it totally your call, just a suggestion.

Sincerely,
Danny