It has sometimes been recognized, for example, but more often forgotten, that Wordsworth's lonely and forsaken women are in some degree stereotypes. To say this is not to deny that such figures may likewise have had some personal meaning for the author. Nevertheless it must be observed that they were perfectly in line with contemporary taste, and did not receive in the Lyrical Balladsa disproportionate amount of attention. Bereaved mothers and deserted females were almost a rage in the poetry departments of the 1790's, and Wordsworth's counterparts, although unquestionably more interesting and endowed with some freshness, conform in numerous particulars to the literary fashion. Some of the women in this numerous class of magazine poems have been seduced (like Martha Ray in The Thorn); some have been abandoned by their lovers or husbands (like Wordsworth's Mad Mother and Indian Woman); others (like his Female Vagrant) have been rendered destitute by death, war, exile, and other kinds of misfortune. Some are homeless wanderers with babes in arms; others haunt the places where their loved ones died, or expire where their hopes lie buried. (from Robert Mayo's "The Contemporaneity of the "Lyrical Ballads" PMLA69-3(Jun.,1954))
For a comparison
Southey, Robert, 1774-1843 : VI. “THE RUINED COTTAGE”.
[from The Poetical Works (1838): JUVENILE AND MINOR POEMS: ENGLISH ECLOGUES]
1 Ay, Charles! I knew that this would fix thine eye;
2 This woodbine wreathing round the broken porch.
3 Its leaves just withering, yet one autumn flower
4 Still fresh and fragrant; and yon holly-hock
5 That through the creeping weeds and nettles tall
6 Peers taller, lifting, column-like, a stem
7 Bright with its roseate blossoms. I have seen
8 Many an old convent reverend in decay,
9 And many a time have trod the castle courts
10 And grass-green halls, yet never did they strike
11 Home to the heart such melancholy thoughts
12 As this poor cottage. Look! its little hatch
13 Fleeced with that grey and wintry moss; the roof
14 Part moulder'd in, the rest o'ergrown with weeds,
15 House-leek, and long thin grass, and greener moss;
16 So Nature steals on all the works of man,
17 Sure conqueror she, reclaiming to herself
18 His perishable piles.
18 I led thee here,
19 Charles, not without design; for this hath been
20 My favourite walk even since I was a boy;
21 And I remember, Charles, this ruin here,
22 The neatest comfortable dwelling-place!
23 That when I read in those dear books which first
[Page 31 ]
24 Woke in my heart the love of poesy,
25 How with the villagers Erminia dwelt,
26 And Calidore for a fair shepherdess
27 Forsook his quest to learn the shepherd's lore,
28 My fancy drew from this the little hut
29 Where that poor princess wept her hopeless love,
30 Or where the gentle Calidore at eve
31 Led Pastorella home. There was not then
32 A weed where all these nettles overtop
33 The garden-wall; but sweet-briar, scenting sweet
34 The morning air; rosemary and marjoram,
35 All wholesome herbs; and then, that woodbine wreathed
36 So lavishly around the pillar'd porch
37 Its fragrant flowers, that when I past this way,
38 After a truant absence hastening home,
39 I could not chuse but pass with slacken'd speed
40 By that delightful fragrance. Sadly changed
41 Is this poor cottage! and its dwellers, Charles! . .
42 Theirs is a simple melancholy tale, . .
43 There's scarce a village but can fellow it:
44 And yet, methinks, it will not weary thee,
45 And should not be untold.
45 A widow here
46 Dwelt with an orphan grandchild: just removed
47 Above the reach of pinching poverty,
48 She lived on some small pittance which sufficed,
49 In better times, the needful calls of life,
50 Not without comfort. I remember her
51 Sitting at evening in that open door-way,
52 And spinning in the sun. Methinks I see her
53 Raising her eyes and dark-rimm'd spectacles
[Page 32 ]
54 To see the passer-by, yet ceasing not
55 To twirl her lengthening thread: or in the garden,
56 On some dry summer evening, walking round
57 To view her flowers, and pointing as she lean'd
58 Upon the ivory handle of her stick,
59 To some carnation whose o'erheavy head
60 Needed support; while with the watering-pot
61 Joanna follow'd, and refresh'd and trimm'd
62 The drooping plant; Joanna, her dear child,
63 As lovely and as happy then as youth
64 And innocence could make her.
64 Charles, it seems
65 As though I were a boy again, and all
66 The mediate years with their vicissitudes
67 A half-forgotten dream. I see the Maid
68 So comely in her Sunday dress! her hair,
69 Her bright brown hair, wreathed in contracting curls;
70 And then her cheek! it was a red and white
71 That made the delicate hues of art look loathsome.
72 The countrymen who on their way to church
73 Were leaning o'er the bridge, loitering to hear
74 The bell's last summons, and in idleness
75 Watching the stream below, would all look up
76 When she passed by. And her old Grandam, Charles, . .
77 When I have heard some erring infidel
78 Speak of our faith as of a gloomy creed,
79 Inspiring superstitious wretchedness,
80 Her figure has recurr'd; for she did love
81 The Sabbath-day; and many a time hath cross'd
82 These fields in rain and through the winter snows,
83 When I, a graceless boy, and cold of foot,
84 Wishing the weary service at its end,
[Page 33 ]
85 Have wonder'd wherefore that good dame came there,
86 Who, if it pleased her, might have staid beside
87 A comfortable fire.
87 One only care
88 Hung on her aged spirit. For herself,
89 Her path was plain before her, and the close
90 Of her long journey near. But then her child
91 Soon to be left alone in this bad world, . . .
92 That was a thought which many a winter night
93 Had kept her sleepless; and when prudent love
94 In something better than a servant's state
95 Had placed her well at last, it was a pang
96 Like parting life to part with her dear girl.
97 One summer, Charles, when at the holidays
98 Return'd from school, I visited again
99 My old accustom'd walks, and found in them
100 A joy almost like meeting an old friend,
101 I saw the cottage empty, and the weeds
102 Already crowding the neglected flowers.
103 Joanna, by a villain's wiles seduced,
104 Had play'd the wanton, and that blow had reach'd
105 Her grandam's heart. She did not suffer long;
106 Her age was feeble, and this mortal grief
107 Brought her grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.
108 I pass this ruin'd dwelling oftentimes,
109 And think of other days. It wakes in me
110 A transient sadness; but the feelings, Charles,
111 Which ever with these recollections rise,
112 I trust in God they will not pass away.
Westbury , 1799.
2. Elegy
An elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject. In Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the metre of a poem (alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as elegiac distichs), not to its mood or content: love poems were often included. Likewise, John Donne applied the term to his amorous and satirical poems in heroic couplets. But since Milton's 'Lycidas' (1637), the term in English has usually denoted a lament (although Milton called his poem a 'monody'), while the adjective 'elegiac' has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems. Two important English elegies that follow Milton in using pastoral conventions are Shelley's 'Adonais' (1821) on the death of Keats, and Arnold's 'Thyrsis' (1867). This tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived from Greek poems by Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the 3rd and 2nd centuries bc, evolved a very elaborate series of conventions by which the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world; pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the muses invoked by the elegist. Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses (in the modern sense) on his friend Arthur Hallam, while Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' (1865) commemorates a public figure---Abraham Lincoln---rather than a friend; Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939) does the same. In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life's transience or its sorrows, as in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751), or in Rilke's Duino Elegies ( 1912 - 22 ). The elegiac stanza is a quatrain of iambic pentameters rhyming abab, named after its use in Gray's 'Elegy'. In an extended sense, a prose work dealing with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth may sometimes be called an elegy. See also dirge, graveyard poetry, monody, threnody.
from Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Baldick, Chris
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. x, 361 p.
The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a writer can be engaged. (Fromthe Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800)
4. Wordsworth's "moral" reflection in the last stanza of "Simon Lee"
The tears into his eyes were brought,/And thanks and praises seemed to run/So fast out of his heart, I thought/They never would have done./--I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds/With coldness still returning./Alas, the gratitude of men/Has oft'ner left me mourning.(97-104)
5. The Picturesque and the ‘ruin’ poetry Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape, Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990: p.117, 119.
In “The Ruined Cottage,” Wordsworth draws on the more traditional eighteenth-century topic of ruined structures, drafting an expressive interaction of decline between cottage and cottager. In “A Night on Salisbury Plain,” the human ruin of the Female Vagrant had been set against the backdrop of the ruin and shrine of Stonehenge. “The Ruined Cottage” takes a more humble sort of building and raises its status to that of a monument, even as the actual fabric of the structure wears down...The subject matter of “The Ruined Cottage”--the decline of cottagers subjected to the purposes of a state in conflict with natural balance—makes a theme of the rift between nature and nation and then mends that rift through a poetic reparation. the inhospitality of the environment in “The Ruined Cottage” is transformed by the pair of meditative minds of Armytage and the narrator. By the end of the poem the poet can find a “secret spirit of humanity” in the decay of the garden, which is retrospectively understood to be the engine of the entire experience.
6. Elegy or History? Kurt Fosso, "Community and Mourning in William Wordsworth's "The Ruined Cottage, 1797-98," Studies in Philology92-3(Summer, 1995): 329-345.
It can indeed be said that in "The Ruined Cottage" history is elegy: a performative attempt to reconstruct through reading and its mourning of difference and distance a "broken"" brotherhood" that elegiac "human passion" desires and effects to mend. The details of this ruinous topography- its overgrown garden "plot,"" deserted well," "bare walls," and "useless fragment" (B.116, 145, 141)-help compose an elegiac script or "plot" that allows one to read and mourn, to decipher and in some way recapitulate a "broken" mourning locked within this landscape of decay, as the hallmark of lost personal and social connection.
7. The Ruined Cottage’s theme: “Human Suffering”Jonathan Wordsworth,The Music of Humanity,London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969: p. 59.
Suffering, interesting at first merely for its sentimental value, later for didactic and political reasons, has now the quality of permanence which was to become Wordsworth’s theme in the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads". It has “the nature of infinity”-in a later phrase, of “that infinity without which there is no poetry.”(Wordsworth’s own words quoted by Crabb Robinson)
8. The Pedlar, Wordsworth’s own ideal self? Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse, New Haven, Yale UP, 1984; p.20.
Many of these passages(which were added to “The Ruined Cottage” to describe the early years of the pedlar) were subsequently transported directly into The Prelude,since they derive from Wordsworth’s imaginative reconstitution of his own childhood, as he much later testified: “I am here called upon freely to acknowledge that the character I have represented in his person[The Pedlar] is chiefly an idea of what I fancied my own character might have become in his circumstances.” ...For The Recluse, the purpose of these additions to “The Ruined Cottage” was to invest the Pedlar with philosophic—that is, metaphysical—authority that would make him a plausible interpreter of Margaret’s sufferings.
9. Dramatic Framework: Poet, Pedlar, and Margaret Jonathan Wordsworth,The Music of Humanity, p.92.
Both Poet and Pedlar are shown as responding to the story that is being told: and by emphasizing their initially very different attitudes, and bringing them finally to something like agreement, Wordsworth is able to persuade the reader to accept the standards he imposes, and even momentarily to believe in a philosophical resolution which outside the context of the poem is presumably unacceptable.
10. The Pedlar, a metaphor for a author in the literary market?Scott Hess, "Wordsworth's Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market," Studies in Romanticism50-1(Spring 2011): 55-78,
The text of The Ruined Cottagesubstitutes for the physical cottage as the central locus of community, marking a shift from immediate, face-to-face community, located in a specific place, to a discursive community of scattered individuals, united by their shared imaginative and sympathetic identification and by the shared act of private reading.
Select Bibliography
Adkins, Nelson F. "Wordsworth's Margaret; Or the Ruined
Cottage." Modern Language Notes
38.8 (1923): 460-6. Print.
Averill, James H. "Suffering and Calm in Wordsworth's Early
Poetry." PMLA: Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America 91.2 (1976): 223-34. Print.
Brooks, Cleanth. "Wordsworth and Human Suffering: Notes on Two
Early Poems." From Sensibility to
Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. Eds. Frederick W.
Hilles and Harold Bloom.Oxford UP, 1965. 373-387. Print.
Cohen, Philip. "Narrative and Persuasion in the Ruined
Cottage." Journal of Narrative
Technique 8 (1978): 185-99. Print.
Fosso, Kurt. Buried Communities:
Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning. State U of New York P, 2004. Print.
---. "Community and Mourning in William Wordsworth's the Ruined
Cottage, 1797-1798." Studies in
Philology 92.3 (1995): 329-45. Print.
Fry, Paul H. "The Pedlar, the Poet, and 'the Ruined
Cottage'." The Oxford Handbook of
William Wordsworth. Eds. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson.Oxford UP,
2015. 365-378. Print.
Janowitz, Anne. England's Ruins:
Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. Blackwell, 1990. Print.
Johnston, Kenneth R. "The Romantic Idea-Elegy: The Nature of
Politics and the Politics of Nature." South
Central Review 9.1 (1992): 24-43. Print.
Mayo, Robert. "The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads."
PMLA 69.3 (1954): 486-522. Print.
Swann, Karen. "Suffering and Sensation in the Ruined
Cottage." PMLA: Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America 106.1 (1991): 83-95. Print.
Ulmer, William A. "Wordsworth, the One Life, and the Ruined
Cottage." Studies in Philology
93.3 (1996): 304-31. Print.
Wordsworth, J., and W. Wordsworth. The
Music of Humanity: A Critical Study of Wordsworth's "Ruined Cottage";
Incorporating Texts from a Manuscript of 1799-1800. Nelson, 1969. Print.
It has sometimes been recognized, for example, but more often forgotten, that Wordsworth's lonely and forsaken women are in some degree stereotypes. To say this is not to deny that such figures may likewise have had some personal meaning for the author. Nevertheless it must be observed that they were perfectly in line with contemporary taste, and did not receive in the Lyrical Balladsa disproportionate amount of attention. Bereaved mothers and deserted females were almost a rage in the poetry departments of the 1790's, and Wordsworth's counterparts, although unquestionably more interesting and endowed with some freshness, conform in numerous particulars to the literary fashion. Some of the women in this numerous class of magazine poems have been seduced (like Martha Ray in The Thorn); some have been abandoned by their lovers or husbands (like Wordsworth's Mad Mother and Indian Woman); others (like his Female Vagrant) have been rendered destitute by death, war, exile, and other kinds of misfortune. Some are homeless wanderers with babes in arms; others haunt the places where their loved ones died, or expire where their hopes lie buried. (from Robert Mayo's "The Contemporaneity of the "Lyrical Ballads" PMLA69-3(Jun.,1954))
For a comparison
Southey, Robert, 1774-1843 : VI. “THE RUINED COTTAGE”.
[from The Poetical Works (1838): JUVENILE AND MINOR POEMS: ENGLISH ECLOGUES]
1 Ay, Charles! I knew that this would fix thine eye;
2 This woodbine wreathing round the broken porch.
3 Its leaves just withering, yet one autumn flower
4 Still fresh and fragrant; and yon holly-hock
5 That through the creeping weeds and nettles tall
6 Peers taller, lifting, column-like, a stem
7 Bright with its roseate blossoms. I have seen
8 Many an old convent reverend in decay,
9 And many a time have trod the castle courts
10 And grass-green halls, yet never did they strike
11 Home to the heart such melancholy thoughts
12 As this poor cottage. Look! its little hatch
13 Fleeced with that grey and wintry moss; the roof
14 Part moulder'd in, the rest o'ergrown with weeds,
15 House-leek, and long thin grass, and greener moss;
16 So Nature steals on all the works of man,
17 Sure conqueror she, reclaiming to herself
18 His perishable piles.
18 I led thee here,
19 Charles, not without design; for this hath been
20 My favourite walk even since I was a boy;
21 And I remember, Charles, this ruin here,
22 The neatest comfortable dwelling-place!
23 That when I read in those dear books which first
[Page 31 ]
24 Woke in my heart the love of poesy,
25 How with the villagers Erminia dwelt,
26 And Calidore for a fair shepherdess
27 Forsook his quest to learn the shepherd's lore,
28 My fancy drew from this the little hut
29 Where that poor princess wept her hopeless love,
30 Or where the gentle Calidore at eve
31 Led Pastorella home. There was not then
32 A weed where all these nettles overtop
33 The garden-wall; but sweet-briar, scenting sweet
34 The morning air; rosemary and marjoram,
35 All wholesome herbs; and then, that woodbine wreathed
36 So lavishly around the pillar'd porch
37 Its fragrant flowers, that when I past this way,
38 After a truant absence hastening home,
39 I could not chuse but pass with slacken'd speed
40 By that delightful fragrance. Sadly changed
41 Is this poor cottage! and its dwellers, Charles! . .
42 Theirs is a simple melancholy tale, . .
43 There's scarce a village but can fellow it:
44 And yet, methinks, it will not weary thee,
45 And should not be untold.
45 A widow here
46 Dwelt with an orphan grandchild: just removed
47 Above the reach of pinching poverty,
48 She lived on some small pittance which sufficed,
49 In better times, the needful calls of life,
50 Not without comfort. I remember her
51 Sitting at evening in that open door-way,
52 And spinning in the sun. Methinks I see her
53 Raising her eyes and dark-rimm'd spectacles
[Page 32 ]
54 To see the passer-by, yet ceasing not
55 To twirl her lengthening thread: or in the garden,
56 On some dry summer evening, walking round
57 To view her flowers, and pointing as she lean'd
58 Upon the ivory handle of her stick,
59 To some carnation whose o'erheavy head
60 Needed support; while with the watering-pot
61 Joanna follow'd, and refresh'd and trimm'd
62 The drooping plant; Joanna, her dear child,
63 As lovely and as happy then as youth
64 And innocence could make her.
64 Charles, it seems
65 As though I were a boy again, and all
66 The mediate years with their vicissitudes
67 A half-forgotten dream. I see the Maid
68 So comely in her Sunday dress! her hair,
69 Her bright brown hair, wreathed in contracting curls;
70 And then her cheek! it was a red and white
71 That made the delicate hues of art look loathsome.
72 The countrymen who on their way to church
73 Were leaning o'er the bridge, loitering to hear
74 The bell's last summons, and in idleness
75 Watching the stream below, would all look up
76 When she passed by. And her old Grandam, Charles, . .
77 When I have heard some erring infidel
78 Speak of our faith as of a gloomy creed,
79 Inspiring superstitious wretchedness,
80 Her figure has recurr'd; for she did love
81 The Sabbath-day; and many a time hath cross'd
82 These fields in rain and through the winter snows,
83 When I, a graceless boy, and cold of foot,
84 Wishing the weary service at its end,
[Page 33 ]
85 Have wonder'd wherefore that good dame came there,
86 Who, if it pleased her, might have staid beside
87 A comfortable fire.
87 One only care
88 Hung on her aged spirit. For herself,
89 Her path was plain before her, and the close
90 Of her long journey near. But then her child
91 Soon to be left alone in this bad world, . . .
92 That was a thought which many a winter night
93 Had kept her sleepless; and when prudent love
94 In something better than a servant's state
95 Had placed her well at last, it was a pang
96 Like parting life to part with her dear girl.
97 One summer, Charles, when at the holidays
98 Return'd from school, I visited again
99 My old accustom'd walks, and found in them
100 A joy almost like meeting an old friend,
101 I saw the cottage empty, and the weeds
102 Already crowding the neglected flowers.
103 Joanna, by a villain's wiles seduced,
104 Had play'd the wanton, and that blow had reach'd
105 Her grandam's heart. She did not suffer long;
106 Her age was feeble, and this mortal grief
107 Brought her grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.
108 I pass this ruin'd dwelling oftentimes,
109 And think of other days. It wakes in me
110 A transient sadness; but the feelings, Charles,
111 Which ever with these recollections rise,
112 I trust in God they will not pass away.
Westbury , 1799.
2. Elegy
An elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject. In Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the metre of a poem (alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as elegiac distichs), not to its mood or content: love poems were often included. Likewise, John Donne applied the term to his amorous and satirical poems in heroic couplets. But since Milton's 'Lycidas' (1637), the term in English has usually denoted a lament (although Milton called his poem a 'monody'), while the adjective 'elegiac' has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems. Two important English elegies that follow Milton in using pastoral conventions are Shelley's 'Adonais' (1821) on the death of Keats, and Arnold's 'Thyrsis' (1867). This tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived from Greek poems by Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the 3rd and 2nd centuries bc, evolved a very elaborate series of conventions by which the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world; pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the muses invoked by the elegist. Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses (in the modern sense) on his friend Arthur Hallam, while Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' (1865) commemorates a public figure---Abraham Lincoln---rather than a friend; Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939) does the same. In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life's transience or its sorrows, as in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751), or in Rilke's Duino Elegies ( 1912 - 22 ). The elegiac stanza is a quatrain of iambic pentameters rhyming abab, named after its use in Gray's 'Elegy'. In an extended sense, a prose work dealing with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth may sometimes be called an elegy. See also dirge, graveyard poetry, monody, threnody.
from Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Baldick, Chris
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. x, 361 p.
The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a writer can be engaged. (Fromthe Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800)
4. Wordsworth's "moral" reflection in the last stanza of "Simon Lee"
The tears into his eyes were brought,/And thanks and praises seemed to run/So fast out of his heart, I thought/They never would have done./--I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds/With coldness still returning./Alas, the gratitude of men/Has oft'ner left me mourning.(97-104)
5. The Picturesque and the ‘ruin’ poetry Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape, Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990: p.117, 119.
In “The Ruined Cottage,” Wordsworth draws on the more traditional eighteenth-century topic of ruined structures, drafting an expressive interaction of decline between cottage and cottager. In “A Night on Salisbury Plain,” the human ruin of the Female Vagrant had been set against the backdrop of the ruin and shrine of Stonehenge. “The Ruined Cottage” takes a more humble sort of building and raises its status to that of a monument, even as the actual fabric of the structure wears down...The subject matter of “The Ruined Cottage”--the decline of cottagers subjected to the purposes of a state in conflict with natural balance—makes a theme of the rift between nature and nation and then mends that rift through a poetic reparation. the inhospitality of the environment in “The Ruined Cottage” is transformed by the pair of meditative minds of Armytage and the narrator. By the end of the poem the poet can find a “secret spirit of humanity” in the decay of the garden, which is retrospectively understood to be the engine of the entire experience.
6. Elegy or History? Kurt Fosso, "Community and Mourning in William Wordsworth's "The Ruined Cottage, 1797-98," Studies in Philology92-3(Summer, 1995): 329-345.
It can indeed be said that in "The Ruined Cottage" history is elegy: a performative attempt to reconstruct through reading and its mourning of difference and distance a "broken"" brotherhood" that elegiac "human passion" desires and effects to mend. The details of this ruinous topography- its overgrown garden "plot,"" deserted well," "bare walls," and "useless fragment" (B.116, 145, 141)-help compose an elegiac script or "plot" that allows one to read and mourn, to decipher and in some way recapitulate a "broken" mourning locked within this landscape of decay, as the hallmark of lost personal and social connection.
7. The Ruined Cottage’s theme: “Human Suffering”Jonathan Wordsworth,The Music of Humanity,London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969: p. 59.
Suffering, interesting at first merely for its sentimental value, later for didactic and political reasons, has now the quality of permanence which was to become Wordsworth’s theme in the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads". It has “the nature of infinity”-in a later phrase, of “that infinity without which there is no poetry.”(Wordsworth’s own words quoted by Crabb Robinson)
8. The Pedlar, Wordsworth’s own ideal self? Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse, New Haven, Yale UP, 1984; p.20.
Many of these passages(which were added to “The Ruined Cottage” to describe the early years of the pedlar) were subsequently transported directly into The Prelude,since they derive from Wordsworth’s imaginative reconstitution of his own childhood, as he much later testified: “I am here called upon freely to acknowledge that the character I have represented in his person[The Pedlar] is chiefly an idea of what I fancied my own character might have become in his circumstances.” ...For The Recluse, the purpose of these additions to “The Ruined Cottage” was to invest the Pedlar with philosophic—that is, metaphysical—authority that would make him a plausible interpreter of Margaret’s sufferings.
9. Dramatic Framework: Poet, Pedlar, and Margaret Jonathan Wordsworth,The Music of Humanity, p.92.
Both Poet and Pedlar are shown as responding to the story that is being told: and by emphasizing their initially very different attitudes, and bringing them finally to something like agreement, Wordsworth is able to persuade the reader to accept the standards he imposes, and even momentarily to believe in a philosophical resolution which outside the context of the poem is presumably unacceptable.
10. The Pedlar, a metaphor for a author in the literary market?Scott Hess, "Wordsworth's Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market," Studies in Romanticism50-1(Spring 2011): 55-78,
The text of The Ruined Cottagesubstitutes for the physical cottage as the central locus of community, marking a shift from immediate, face-to-face community, located in a specific place, to a discursive community of scattered individuals, united by their shared imaginative and sympathetic identification and by the shared act of private reading.
Select Bibliography
Adkins, Nelson F. "Wordsworth's Margaret; Or the Ruined
Cottage." Modern Language Notes
38.8 (1923): 460-6. Print.
Averill, James H. "Suffering and Calm in Wordsworth's Early
Poetry." PMLA: Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America 91.2 (1976): 223-34. Print.
Brooks, Cleanth. "Wordsworth and Human Suffering: Notes on Two
Early Poems." From Sensibility to
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