RomAntics III: Spotlight on… Wordsworth’s ‘Louisa’

Louisa

~ After Accompanying Her On A Mountain Excursion

I met Louisa in the shade,

And, having seen that lovely Maid,

Why should I fear to say

That, nymph-like, she is fleet and strong.

And down the rocks can leap along

Like rivulets in May?

And she hath smiles to earth unknown;

Smiles, that with motion of their own

Do spread, and sink, and rise;

That come and go with endless play,

And ever, as they pass away,

Are hidden in her eyes.

She loves her fire, her cottage-home;

Yet o’er the moorland will she roam

In weather rough and bleak;

And, when against the wind she strains,

Oh! might I kiss the mountain rains

That sparkle on her cheek.

Take all that’s mine “beneath the moon,”

If I with her but half a noon

May sit beneath the walls

Of some old cave, or mossy nook,

When up she winds along the brook

To hunt the waterfalls.

Englishverse.com, 'Louisa', William Wordsworth, [online] available at: https://englishverse.com/poems/louisa [Accessed 14 Jan. 2026].

What is Wordsworth known for? The Lake District, yes. Daffodils, most certainly. His partnership with Coleridge? You bet. A cheeky few years away in France, entertaining relatively radical politics and birthing an illegitimate child? Aye, saucy minx that he was. A disappointing tendency to dryness, desiccation and religious pomposity? To many fans, this too. But love poetry? Not so much.

This is my most recent Wordsworth discovery. I was in the midst of one of those joyous cultural sprees where you listen to and read those works which you consider aesthetically perfect, self-contained pieces. Crucially such binges have to occur few and far between, and must arise from a Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow, so as not to receive over-exposure. In this case, attendees around the culturally bacchanalian roundtable included Schubert, Mendelssohn, Handel, Dickens, Coleridge, Hardy, Auden and Wordsworth. And during said debauched splurge, I delved once again into Wordsworth’s back catalogue, finding ‘Louisa’.

‘Louisa’ is to Wordsworth what Empire Burlesque is to Bob Dylan, celeriac is to a salad, and the Waterloo and City Line is to London. In other words, underground, rare, underappreciated and slightly inscrutable. It was allegedly written in 1805, alongside its companion poem, ‘To a Young Lady Who Had Been Reproached For Taking Long Walks In The Country’. There is a little confusion about the dates, as so often with Wordsworth (what I wouldn’t have given to be on his admin team - where is Fireflies when you need it…) - his ‘To a Young Lady’, was, he wrote, ‘composed at the same time’ and ‘designed to make one piece’, but was written in 1802. The poems do indeed seem to bear the stamps of his earlier work, and Millicent Fawcett felt that the likely date of composition was as much as ten years prior to that registered.

Upon reading ‘Louisa’ my first thought was that it is not only one of Wordsworth’s finest poems, but is perhaps his only explicit love poem. As a poet he has a tendency to sublimate any romantic or erotic feeling - in fact, ‘sublimate’ is generous. Wordsworth actively avoids musings on love, passion and the like. He increasingly chastises his youthful caperings - ‘weaknesses’ - harshly, promoting, in ‘Ode to Duty’ (1805) ‘the spirit of self-sacrifice [and] the confidence of reason’.

Love, in Wordsworth’s poetry, is normally focalised extrinsically. It is love of nature, place, a vague aggregate ‘home’, humankind generally, or is elegiac, a love for the deceased, love for their mystically abiding existence in the memory and in nature. With the exception of his Lucy poems (which, for that matter, are by no means explicitly romantic, and could well signify filial, sororal or more spiritual, transcendent love), Wordsworth doesn’t really write about romantic or marital love between humans. Family, he does. Matrimony, less so - unless it is to illustrate some pure, beneficent picture of a vaguely rural nuptial bliss.

Perhaps it is because his poetry is so preoccupied with loss and change (something that pervaded his family home, but not his marriage - he died nine years before his wife Mary Hutchinson); perhaps it is because he wanted to remain relatively private - but whatever the reason, it’s pretty unequivocal that Wordsworth’s dearth of explicit love poetry is disproportionate to his contemporaries. Coleridge, who harboured a long-term, passionate love for Mary Hutchinson’s sister, Sara (‘Asra’), would write words that could never have flowed from Wordsworth’s pen, at least not publicly:

But thou, dear Sara! (dear indeed thou art,

My Comforter! A Heart within my Heart!)

Thou, & the Few, we love, tho' few ye be,

Make up a world of Hopes & Fears for me.

(A Letter To Sara Hutchinson, April 4, 1802 -- Sunday Evening)

The same is true of Coleridge’s ‘Love’ (1799):

She half enclosed me with her arms,

She pressed me with a meek embrace;

And bending back her head, looked up,

And gazed upon my face.

'Twas partly love, and partly fear,

And partly 'twas a bashful art,

That I might rather feel, than see,

The swelling of her heart.

But Wordsworth would never 'rather feel, than see'. He is a poet of quiet observation and reflection, not action. He tends to meet someone (a lonely leech-gatherer, an 'idiot boy', a little girl at a grave), and then retrospectively learns something from such encounters. He doesn’t normally do what he does in 'Louisa', yearn, seek out, chase or rashly leap after a characte. This is partly what makes ‘Louisa’’s subtle tenderness so affecting. The poem is powerful both by dint of the emotions which have overspilled, and by the rareness of this instance, whereby the poet so unusually gives way to such feeling. Wordsworth himself clearly realised this was wayward by his typical standards, and in later editions of the poem, cut the second stanza ('And she hath smiles to earth unknown[...]') - the most explicitly ardent, admiring, and bewildered with love.

It is frustrating, but telling, that Wordsworth cropped those words, words which celebrate the smiles of a woman which are both so beautiful and so bemusing that they transcend earth’s knowledge, have a ‘motion of their own’ and feel ‘endless’ - ancient, yet also brimming with a youthfulness which is conjured by the bouncing, lilting energy of ‘play’ and ‘spread, and sink, and rise’. The woman’s gentle teasing, too, is reflected by her smile’s echoes in her ‘eyes’. Wordsworth’s original penultimate line - ‘When she goes barefoot up the brook’ - was also amended to what you see here. His primary impulsive depiction of a wild, sprite-like creature gradually received moderation and attenuation, and, given Wordsworth’s serial editing and re-editing tendencies, probably would have continued to, had the poem been more widely recognised or re-published.

Wordsworth is almost answering his own question of the first stanza: ‘why’, indeed, should he ‘fear’ to celebrate the girl’s ‘nymph-like, fleet and strong’ movements? Well, because they are improper, indecorous, and she has recently been ‘Reproached For Taking Long Walks In The Country’, I suppose. As his sister poem intimates, the woman’s resoluteness and steadfastness, continuation of activities her aggressors criticise - her ‘thoughts and feelings [that] shall not die’ - make her all the more lovable, showing ‘us how divine a thing/ A Woman may be made’. Unusually romantic rhetoric for Wordsworth, I think. And ‘Louisa’ goes even further.

In stanza three, Wordsworth celebrates the sublimity of ferocious mountain ‘weather rough and bleak’; he loves it, but he also loves how the woman ‘strains’ and ‘roams’ through the wilderness - thrilling experiences, without which the ‘fire’ and ‘cottage-home’ would be dull and confined. The ‘mountain rains’ ‘sparkle on her cheek’, and presumably her dress clings to her in the downpour, her eyes glisten with wild excitement - Wordsworth’s exhalatory ‘Oh!’ interrupts his description as if his thoughts are overridden, cut off and impelled by this sight to ‘kiss’ the woman’s sparkling ‘cheek’.

He scorns material objects, spurning them with acerbic quotation marks - ‘“beneath the moon”’. Money couldn’t buy the experience of joining the woman on one of her adventures to caves, nooks, brooks or waterfalls.

Wordsworth uses a tail-rhyme stanza (AABCCB) in both ‘Louisa’ and ‘To a Young Lady’, and it is a corrective model, where the final line of each stanza returns to its third line. It lends a certain spontaneity to the rhyme, precluding a sense of absolute, contrived perfection - the third line’s end-stopped rhyme has usually floated out of the reader’s consciousness by the time it is rehashed several lines later. This seeming unpredictability of form reflects its flitting female subject matter, and also Wordsworth’s approval of it: ‘let them rail!’.

There we have it, my tuppence worth. As always with lit crit, I pretty much just mean to say, ‘wow this is amazing - I’ll try to explain why, but basically, read it’. I hope that anyone who got this far can give an iota of appreciation to this poem and to this poet, who gives us such powerful glimpses of human feeling - hope, loss, struggling faith, and now, although he is rarely celebrated for it, love, too.

© - Bea Wood, 2026