Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

370 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE! [xiI.
The main aim of the \vhole poem is to set forth the
purification and elevation of the heroine's character by
the baptism of sorrow through which she was doomed
to pass. Let us hear Wordsworth's own account of it.
In one of those reminiscences which he dictated in his
later years, after noting that the White Doe had been
compared with Scott's poems, because, like them, the
scene was laid in feudal times, —
' The comparison,' he says, ' is inconsiderate. Sir Walter pur-
sued the customary and very natural course of conducting an
action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding
point, as a termination or catastrophe. The course I attempted
to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted by
the chief personages in the White Doe fails, so far as its object
is external and substantial ; so far as it is moral and spiritual it
succeeds. The heroine knows that her duty is not to interfere
with the current of events, either to forward or delay them ; but
"To abide
The shock, and finally secure
O'er pain and grief a triumph pure."
The anticipated beatification, if I may say so, of her mind, and
the apotheosis of the companion of her solitude, are the points at
which the poem aims, and constitute its legitimate catastrophe —
far too spiritual a one for instant and wide-spread sympathy, but
not therefore the less fitted to make a deep and permanent im-
pression upon those minds who think and feel more indepen-
dently, than the many do, of the surfaces of things, and of interests
transitory, because belonging more to the outward and social
forms of life than to its internal spirit.'
Such is Wordsworth's account of his aim, given
late in life, to the friend who wrote down his remini-
scences of his own poems.