The Lady of the Thorn

While reading "The Thorn" I was struck by how close between the wailing woman and the thorn seemed to be related. Upon a review of the poem, It became clear to me that the woman an the thorn are one and the same, in the context of the poem. The first thing that drew my attention was the use of the word "wretched" to describe both the thorn in line 9 and the woman in line 68. Next the parallel stories of the thorn and the woman cement their symbolic relationship. The "hillock like an infant's grave" is the thing that binds the woman so closely to the hill, and the hillock is "a hill of moss." The thorn is also bound to the hill, being overgrown and "hung with heavy tufts of moss" that are trying "to drag it to the ground." In the same way that the moss of the hill has bound the thorn, the memories associated with her child from the hill ( and possibly even her child's grave) bind the woman to that spot. What I find most interesting is that the moss is described as trying "to bury this poor thorn forever." Following the parallel, the woman's sadness or guilt surrounding the infant's death is killing her, possibly by drawing her out into the extreme conditions of the hill or, more likely, just killing her with emotional distress. While I'm sure the link between the thorn and woman was fairly obvious and that this post is not revolutionary, the particulars of how Wordsworth correlates them so closely was of interest to me.