Abstract
Lyrical Ballads is a book which is concerned at every point with the dialogue between man and man, and between man and the external world. In the narrative poems, such as ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, Wordsworth is exploring the relationship of the marginal individual to the society which surrounds him. In the earliest-written poem of the collection,1 ‘The Convict’ (never reprinted after 1798) an individual is separated from society by the process of crime and punishment, and the result is degradation and misery:
His black matted hair on his shoulder is bent,
And deep is the sigh of his breath,
And with steadfast dejection his eyes are intent
On the fetters that link him to death.
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Notes and References
Thomas L. Ashton has made a neat contrast between this and the Wordsworth who climbed Snowdon in ‘The Thorn: Wordsworth’s Insensitive Plant’, Huntington Library Quarterly, XXXV (1971–2), pp. 171–87.
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© 1982 J. R. Watson
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Watson, J.R. (1982). Lyrical Ballads: Dialogue and Suffering. In: Wordsworth’s Vital Soul. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05911-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05911-9_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-05913-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-05911-9
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