In the selections from Wordsworth we read for class, three out of the four poems have children at their forefront. In “Anecdote For Fathers” Edward, the son of the speaker, seems to answer his father’s question without thought, but when asked to give an explanation of his judgment he has none, showcasing his innocence. “The Thorn” contains the character of a dead child who remains unnamed, but lies at the heart of his mother’s guiltiness (or guiltlessness) and her woe, putting forth the idea of a child having power or control despite their absentness or feebleness. And in “We Are Seven” a little maiden insists to the speaker the inclusion of all of her siblings, disregarding that two have died, and embodying persistence. All of these children, despite their differing characteristics, promote and idea in Wordsworth’s work that children, through their unconditioned responses, have a direct link to the natural.
Within “The Thorn” the dead child is connected inextricably with nature; he is characterized with the moss hill (210-11, 225-8) and the pond (217-18) and in embodying these landmarks, perpetuates his mother’s grief upon her visiting. The child then can be said to create an incredibly animalistic grief in the mother, it being both the source of her dismay and the original source of her sanity, “the unborn infant wrought/ About its mother’s heart, and brought/ Her senses back again” (139-41). The child, once her sanity and now the impetus for her madness, creates a sadness in the woman that is devoid of any rationality that may have come through her maturity.
The young maiden in “We Are Seven” thus reacts to death in a natural sense, where it’s not accepted, but thwarted through relationship. She insists that the family is still seven because of her siblings’ graves’ proximity to her home saying that she knits her stockings, hems her kerchief, and sings (41-4) with them so, they are still part of the family. The speaker insists on the rational, pointing out over and over (and bordering on heartlessly) that her siblings are in fact dead and that her family is now five instead of seven, but the girl continues to reach for the natural, for the simple, for the fact that they are still a family because they are still “around” so to speak. The poem seems to be insisting that death, then, though natural, is a devastating occurrence because people insist on rationalizing the irrational, on quantifying the natural instead of accepting it as simply that, as something spatial and not irreconcilable.
And in “Anecdote For Fathers,” Edward unravels his father’s question of why by giving an explanation that isn’t an explanation, but simply an observation. Edward’s decision that he likes Kilve better than Liswyn farm is a decision made by instinct alone, denoted by his drawn out pause of four stanzas (37-52) when asked for an explanation. Then the weather cock comes like an epiphany, a revelation of nature, and the boy has what to him is a satisfactory answer because it is an answer. And the father praises this in the last stanza, wishing he could teach “the hundredth part/ Of what from thee I learn” (59-60), what he learns being that every question does not need a logical answer, but that nature itself will answer for us. In all of these poems, Wordsworth points at the base nature of the human through children, that rationality is something built atop nature not in its place.
I also decided to focus on the children in these poems and had your analysis in the back of my mind while writing! I am a little unclear in your analysis of We Are Seven when you say, "people insist on rationalizing the irrational, on quantifying the natural" -- is it the child or the adult that does this in the poem? It is interesting to look at it either way: the child is insisting on rationalizing the fact that she can indeed sit on her siblings physical bodies and therefore in some sense can only view the world literally. On the other hand, the adult insists on the fact that she only have five siblings and refuses to accept any irrational comment (I agree it becomes fairly heartless). If looked at with the latter explanation, with the devastating occurrence being the adults lack of ability to accept the irrational, then it becomes a beautiful thing where the girl appears to be more knowledgeable than the man.
ReplyDeleteI agree! The second interpretation of "We Are Seven" is the one I was leaning toward. It seems Wordsworth has an affinity for idealizing children as closest to his god-like Nature. Yet, I wonder what his idea of childhood ignorance is and whether this may have some play in his poems. As someone who went to university and became well educated, does he believe learning is a blessing or a tract that only drags you farther from the natural?
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