W is for what might have been or what I might have written. Can I be influenced
by what I might have done but didn't? -- as if the choice to write what I
couldn't or didn't were still before me. It is not as if what I might have
written exists, even as a possibility. Still, I sometimes say to myself that
if I hadn't done this, I might have done that, even if I don't know what that
might be. What I might have written stands in shadowy, sober judgment of what
I might have written. It gathers whatever self it has and comes, unbidden, to
visit me. W is also for what I would never have written because I could not
have, even in a thousand years. A conceivable source of unhappiness, it is in
fact a relief. Think if I had written the first hundred or so lines in
Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude, what a great poet I would be. I would have to
destroy everything else I had written to keep people from saying, "What a
falling off there has been in Strand's work." So I wouldn't be me, and I would
not have my poems, and I would have nothing to worry about.
W is for Wordsworth, who wrote what I didn't and couldn't and won't.
--
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