Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson

Abstract

Wordsworth's poem ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ suggests that it is better not to go somewhere than to go and risk being disappointed. Responding to this idea in the poem ‘Askam Unvisited’, the twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson describes how he had planned to visit the dilapidated town of Askam in the southern Lake District only to face an agony of indecision before resolving in the end not to go. Both poets look forward to a time when they might be forced to look back with regret, and choose instead to preserve a sense of what might have been. A preoccupation with the passage of time and the consequences of decision-making is connected in these poems to the workings of rhyme, particularly to rhyme's relationship with effects of timing and determinism.