The sonnet ends with Wordsworth telling the luckless Miss Gillies that she lacks ‘that inward eye’ which she would require to produce art which could ‘the visual powers of Nature satisfy’. An oddly misjudged piece of gallantry perhaps, and certainly not one of his greatest poems but Wordsworth felt strongly about it, telling his daughter that he had ‘never poured out anything more truly from the heart’, and his intensity was doubtless due not only to his feelings about his elderly wife (they were the same age) but also to his instinctive misgiving about pictures. He preferred to visualise Mary in her salad days: ‘’tis a fruitless task to paint for me, / Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, / By the habitual light of memory see / Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, / And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee / Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be’.

When, in 1840 or so, a well-meaning houseguest called Margaret Gillies made a drawing of the 70-year old Mrs Wordsworth, everyone agreed that it was an excellent likeness but her kind act was rewarded with a testy and somewhat ungracious sonnet from the sitter’s husband. ‘We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,’ wrote William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in the famous ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), ‘and, accordingly, we call them Sisters.’ To speak of the ‘sister arts’ was indeed a critical platitude of the age, though as it happens Wordsworth’s attitude towards painting wasn’t normally very sisterly.

Poems by williams wordsworth