summary of the poem The Affliction of Margaret by William Wordsworth what does the mother say about things ensued that wanted grace?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
The real title of this poem, which the AQA Anthology chooses to abbreviate, is “The Affliction of Margaret — of —”. In other words, in this title Wordsworth was making clear that he had a particular person in mind, and that his poem is based on real events. This is, in a way, the essence of Wordsworth’s greatness: a turn towards realism. This is a “missing persons” poem, about the pain of someone vanishing, or not being in touch. You don’t know if they are dead. You’re worried about what has happened to them. You’re confused and worried sick about why they haven’t been in touch. To get near to this poem, even though it was published in 1807, there would be no better place to start than to look at the website of the charity that today deals with this matter, the National Missing Persons Helpline.
In a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick many years later, Wordsworth explained the occasion of the poem:
Town-End, Grasmere. 1804. This was taken from the case of a poor widow who lived in the town of Penrith. Her sorrow was well known to Mary, to my Sister, and, I believe, to the whole town. She kept a shop, and when she saw a stranger passing by, she was in the habit of going out into the street to inquire of him after her son.
That in itself is a moving picture, and it obviously formed the basis for Wordsworth’s poem, in which he finds a voice for this woman, giving her simple yet dignified language, and shaping her grief and worry into a moving and meditative poem. The poem is wonderfully direct. It uses immediate and relatively simple language to give us this woman’s pain and distress. Here, as elsewhere, Wordsworth deliberately avoids a high or more artificial eighteenth-century style of vocabulary.
The poem begins with an impassioned cry, “Where art thou …” (line 1), then repeated in the second line. Day and night this woman worries about what has happened to her grown-up boy. There is some suggestion in the poem (in stanza 6 for example) that, in a motherly way, she used to nag him about getting a good job and making money. Now, she doesn’t care at all. If only he would get in touch with her “prosperous or undone” (3), i.e. whether he’s doing well, or whether he’s down and out.
Gradually, she tells us the story of her suffering. Her son has been missing for seven years (8); he was handsome (16). At first she wrongly thought that he might have deliberately snubbed her (29–35); she doesn’t mind now, however he is, just so long as he will get in touch (36–42). She worries what may have happened to him – has he been imprisoned in France, say? Is he lost somewhere in Africa? Or was he drowned when his ship sank? (50–56). She feels wholly isolated in her grief and uncertainty.
The stanza form is relatively simple, to match this emotionally direct subject-matter. The line is iambic tetrameter, a simple eight-syllable line, and the rhyme scheme is alternating, followed by a triplet: ababccc . Nonetheless, within this simple form, Wordsworth organizes her speech beautifully, so that the widow’s total situation gradually unfolds, and the pathos of the speech deepens as it goes along. Most of the vocabulary is direct and straightforward, which gives weight to the polysyllabic “incommunicable” in line 56. At that point, the weighty tragedy of the poem intensifies. The corpses of “Thou and all thy mates” are “incommunicable” in the sense of “not in communication (with others or with each other)”. The corpses can say nothing to each other, as they lie together at the bottom of the sea. But, of course, being “incommunicable” reflects the widow’s own situation: it is the fact that she is out of communication with her son that is so painful to her. She has no idea what has happened to him; she is simply worried sick. If stanza 8 is one climax to her heart-break, the other is the last stanza, and the breathtakingly simple ending: “I have no other earthly friend” (77). That tells us, of course, that she does still think of her dead husband, now in heaven; but here on earth she has no other children and clearly no support-network of relatives. Her only son should have been the prop and support of her old age, but now he is gone, goodness knows where.