Worthen uses this enjoyably ludicrous example of editorial high-handedness as an argument for the serious thesis that underpins and justifies his book. For them, Worthen observes, the arrival of the dung was in its own way probably as important as that of the poem.
The full journal entry suggests that the retreat to the orchard was actually a response to the unromantic but necessary physical labor of digging in the newly arrived dung, without which the Wordsworths could not grow the vegetable crops on which they were dependent to eke out their impoverished existence. This seems even more appropriate when we know that the poem Wordsworth was working on was his incomparable Immortality Ode. It conjures up the perfect image of the Romantic poet, giving his all to his art and suffering in consequence. Knight's version, leaping straight from Wordsworth's composition of "part of an ode" to his sitting with his sister in the orchard, implies that the poet was so exhausted by his literary efforts at breakfast that he was incapable of doing anything else for the rest of the day. William Knight, the first editor of the journal, considered the arrival of the dung and the poet's subsequent employment to be merely "trivial details" that could legitimately be omitted from his edition because they were not "of any literary or biographical value." As Worthen entertainingly points out, however, in his preface to The Gang, what may seem like a minor editorial decision has important consequences. Saturday a divine morning-at Breakfast Wm wrote part of an ode-Mr Olliff sent the Dung & Wm went to work in the garden we sate all day in the orchard.