The political content of the 1846 Gedichte aus dem Englischen is primarily maintained through the poems by Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849), the radical 'Com-law rhymer', and (to a lesser degree) Robert Southey (1774-1843). Compared to Freiligrath's own style in political verse, however, it remains muted. Mary Howitt, one of the poets included, will have been made very aware of this when in 1846 Freiligrath presented her with a copy of his own Ça Ira. This is a small book of six politically incendiary poems, the first of which is set to the metre of the Marseillaise (Freiligrath 1846b). Two years after Gedichte aus dem Englischen was published, Freiligrath was back in Germany, continuing to write overtly political poetry in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. In 'Hamlet' (translated in the 1869 Poems from the German by Ferdinand Freiligrath by William Howitt, Mary's husband), he wrote:

Deutschland is Hamlet! Solemn, slow.

Within its gates walks etery night.

Pale, buried Freedom to and frc

And fills the watchers with affrigh

I suggest that this is a darker rendering of Ludolf Weinbarg's description of Goethe's Faust in his Ästhetische Feldzüge of 1834: "Faust is Germany struggling to be liberated, indeed he is the liberated Germany as it anticipates the victory of its freedom." (Seeba 2003:187) It should be noted, however, that by the time Freiligrath was writing, Shakespeare, of all the English writers, had acquired what was virtually a distinct German identity in consequence of repeated acts of translation.

We know that around this time Freiligrath's reading of English political poetry started to include the Chartist poet Ernest Jones. In 1848 his own defiant poem memorialising the victims of the fighting in Berlin, 'Die Toten an die Lebenden', triggered his arrest for sedition. He was tried and acquitted, but soon after emigrated to England where he found work in the London branch of a Swiss Bank. He wrote on German literature, contributing frequently to The Athenaeum. By this time he was also corresponding, and on very familiar terms, with Karl Marx. Freiligrath eventually returned to Germany in 1868, and his final volume of poetry was published in 1876, the year of his death.

The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock, an anthology of English, Scottish, and Irish poetry, edited by Freiligrath, was first published in Stuttgart in 1853 (Freiligrath 1853). All the poetry is in English. There appear to have been at least five editions of this version, with Freiligrath's wife and his daughter Kate involved in the editing. The Preface to the revised 1874 edition notes that after more than 20 years in print, the anthology was still popular. This collection provides us with a reasonably reliable indication of which poems by Wordsworth had become familiar to an English reading German public in the 1860s and 1870s.

In Section 1, 'Poesy and the Poets', there are six poems by Wordsworth from a total of 52. These include 'Resolution and Independence', 'Scorn not the sonnet', 'To the Sons of Burns', and 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge'. Wordsworth is for the most part characterised in the Anthology as he is in this section, as a poet who produces verse in a reflective, lyrical mode. He has no poetry in the second or third section of the 1854 edition, but in Section 4, 'Society,Work and Progress', there are three extracts from The Excursion. It is here that, once again, issues of political conflict are given prominence.

The Excursion, first published in 1814, was intended by Wordsworth as the central section of his major work, a philosophical poem of epic proportions to be called The Recluse. He never completed the project, leaving the Nine Book Excursion (totalling 8,850 lines of poetry) to be read as his response to the major political and social issues confronting England in the early nineteenth century. Written throughout in Miltonic blank verse, it contains the observations of a small group of men on the recent history of the British Nation, not least the impact of the French Revolution, the fate of those who had been disappointed in their hopes for reform in the political life of Britain, and the consequences of the onset of industrialisation.

In the context of Wordsworth studies, The Excursion is an important measure of the extent to which Wordsworth continued to harbour disaffected views on the conduct of the British Government through the French Revolution period and on through the period of war with Napoleonic France that followed. The poem also contains a passionate critique of modern industrialisation and the consequent fate of those either drawn into factory labour, or thrown into rural poverty. Considered until relatively recently to signal unproblematically the poet's retreat into conservatism, Freiligrath's choice of extracts from The Excursion accords with more recent readings of the poem as one in which social, political, and religious conflict remain centre stage, and are far from being resolved in a manner that endorses the status quo (Williams 2002:162-196).

Freiligrath turned to Book VIII, The Parsonage', for his extracts. The passage beginning at line 87 reflects on the effect on the countryside of industrial change:

An inventive Age

Has wought, if not with speed of magic, yet

To most strange issues. I have lived to mark

A new and unforeseen creation rise

From out the labours of a peaceful Land

Wielding her potent enginery to frame

And to produce, with appetite as keen

As that of war, which rests not night or day.

Industrious to destroy!

Freiligrath called this extract The Manufacturing Spirit'. The second passage is headed The Factory at Night', and begins at line 170:

... at the appointed hour a bell is heard

Of harsher import than the cuurfew-knol

That spake the Norman Conqueror's stern behest -

A local summons to unceasing toil!