Celestial Cartography

Chapter 2 documents the place of the Moon and the night sky in the communal life of the Wordsworths and Coleridge at Alfoxden and Grasmere by tracing an interwoven series of scientific, natural, and typographical crescents in their poems, notebooks, and letters, before culminating in a reading of the 1802 revisions made to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. It shows that star-gazing, far from being injurious to their sensibilities, was most often a memorializing pleasure for the poets and their families in the absence of John Wordsworth. The chapter focuses on the workings of allusion and communal memory in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals; Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘A Letter to ——’, and ‘A Soliloquy of the Full Moon’; and Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’ and ‘The Thorn’.