Wordsworth’s Imperfect Perfect

This chapter discusses William Wordsworth's misuse of the present-perfect tense in his famous lines about a boy of Winander—a mistake that implies that the boy is still living when one knows from the poem that he is gone, that the episode was in the past. It investigates several possibilities—the poet's ambiguous treatment of death in other poems about children, the prevalence of the present perfect elsewhere in Wordsworth's verse, and his own sense of grammatical propriety—before calling a mistake a mistake. The present perfect is a common Wordsworthian grammatical construction, especially in poems about memory, and one that he uses correctly and with assurance throughout his poetry. More likely than not, the poet would have corrected his present perfect had it been brought to his attention—just as he corrected his personal pronouns in revising that original draft. This particular error suggests a difference between accident and mistake that will be central to the chapters that follow.