William Wordsworth’s Danish Ghost and the Ballad that Never Was

Abstract

ABSTRACTWilliam Wordsworth’s “A Fragment,” later renamed as “The Danish Boy. A Fragment,” was first published in Lyrical Ballads (1800). It is a vignette of a ghost – a Danish boy – singing in the landscape. It is the aim of the article to examine the poem in a number of contexts that have not previously been discussed. It is argued that the singing and harp-playing ghost is a trope for the poetic vigour that had dissipated under the demands for classical styles of poetry. More than any other piece in Lyrical Ballads, “A Fragment” points to the ancient Germanic origin of the new models for poetic composition that were put forward. The poem participates in the “bardic revival,” which is closely linked to Romantic-era fiction and antiquarianism. But, it is specifically the idea of the skalds, the ancient Scandinavian bards, which is significant here. Wordsworth’s interest in Norse poetry will be assessed, and so will concurrent antiquarian claims that skaldic poetry was the direct progenitor of imaginative poetry in England.