Strange Fits of Passion

Turns out you can't believe everything you learn in school. Today I realized that I had left out a stanza from William Wordsworth's "Strange fits of passion have I known" when I used it for my 9th grade English class four years ago. My students probably still haven't gotten over it.

I came across my mistake when I used the poem as part of a series of seven response poems, a project suggested by a great friend. This would have been the seventh and final poem too, although they're all still in their first drafts, but now I need to add a stanza. In the meantime, here's what I had (first, the original; then, my response):

Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew night
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, I the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a lover’s head!
“O Mercy!” to myself I cried
“If Lucy should be dead!”


- William Wordsworth


…


Strange cases and conspiracies
Made up that daring show
Which kept my curiosity
Fixed on the TV’s glow.

Each episode she got hotter
In body and in mind,
Still Mulder seemed to look past her—
ET had made him blind.

The plot would waver here and there,
But my love never did;
Yet she worked for the FBI,
While I was just a kid.

She disappeared in Season Two,
Abducted on a hill;
Throughout her absence my love grew
And became stronger still.

[Missing Stanza!]

Her return came as no surprise,
I shouldn’t have been scared;
They still must deal with all those lies
The government prepared.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a lover’s head!
“O Mercy!” to myself I cried
“If Scully should be dead!”