Lines Written On A Blank Leaf In A Copy Of The Authors Poem The Excursion - Analysis

A marginal elegy that justifies publishing by turning it into a last gift

This short poem reads like a private note that suddenly becomes an argument with grief. Wordsworth’s central claim is that releasing an unfinished Song to the public—something he did with reluctance strong—can be redeemed by a single, intimate consequence: it reached one particular reader, MURFITT, before death. The poem makes publication feel less like self-display and more like providence, because the book arrives in the vicar’s hands in time to become part of what he take[s] with him.

Reluctance versus self-congratulation

The opening is almost defensive. The speaker stresses how unwilling he was to deliver the work to public notice, and he even calls it unfinished, lowering expectations and implying scruple. But then he admits a jarring counter-feeling: I look / With self-congratulation on the Book. That phrase holds the poem’s key tension. The speaker wants to be humble about an incomplete project, yet he also cannot help feeling proud—because the book has become the vehicle of something morally significant. The pride isn’t exactly about artistry; it’s about timing, reach, and effect.

MURFITT as the poem’s measure of worth

To make that redemption credible, Wordsworth paints Murfitt in tightly chosen terms: pious, learned, with a saintly Spirit. This isn’t random praise; it establishes a reader whose approval carries ethical weight. Murfitt saw and read the book, and the speaker’s mind is warmed by the idea that his thoughts were, in a sense, sustained by that spirit: Upon my thoughts his saintly Spirit fed. The direction of the feeding is interesting—less like the poet nourishing the reader, more like the reader sanctifying the poet’s own relationship to the work.

The bitter turn: gratitude under the shadow of how soon

The poem pivots on Murfitt’s ignorance: he read with a grateful heart, Foreboding not his imminent departure. That lack of foreknowledge makes the scene both tender and cruel. The phrase new-born Lay underscores the irony: something just born is immediately pressed into service at the edge of death. What began as anxiety about an unfinished poem turns into astonishment at its accidental completeness as a final comfort.

What kind of joy can cross the boundary?

The closing lines lift the private incident into a religious claim: Murfitt was given a joy like the one good men take with them from earth to heaven. The poem doesn’t say the book saves him; it says the act of grateful reading joins the category of portable spiritual goods. That’s the poem’s final resolution of its contradiction: the author’s uneasy public act is reframed as a quiet contribution to a deathbed economy, where what matters is not fame, but what can be carried onward.