Consider the Significance of Suffering in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads

In days ‘of dereliction and despair’[1], the first Lyrical Ballads register poverty, fear, hunger and displacement, with its focus on bereft and suffering figures, the term ‘Ballads’ itself representing the songs of low and rustic life[2]. In the famous Preface[3] to the 1800 edition, Wordsworth reiterates the expressing of his verse in ‘the real language of men’[4] and therefore his inclination to ‘chuse incidents and situations from common life’ and ‘trace in them, though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature’[5]. In this way, Wordsworth is sympathetic to the sufferings of regular people and illuminates their feeling by stripping back the pomp and artifice he perceived in the poetry of his day.The principal way in which Wordsworth typically depicts suffering is through presenting marginalised figures on the peripheries of society as the focal individuals of his poems, and for some, such as the narrator of The Female Vagrant, it is this sense of social neglect and isolation, almost in and of itself, which warrants the suffering of its central character[6]. Similarly, in The Thorn, the poet presents a ‘wretched woman’ (68) named Martha Ray who is entirely castigated from her society and subject to circulating rumours of madness and infanticide. While it is not clearly illustrated that her unhappiness is amplified by her exile, the overall depiction evokes a sense of ‘exceeding pain’ (141) with, perhaps more significantly, nobody to help her alleviate such suffering. In addition, as a jilted woman, she appears to possess little choice but to sit ‘beside the thorn’ (82) in solitude repeating a frenzied ‘doleful cry’ (88), devoid of property or relations. The ‘lovely tints’ (45) of nature admired so vehemently by the narrator in the opening stanzas eventually descend to ‘mist and rain, and storm and rain’ (187) in reflection of Ray’s constant exposure to the elements. Often in Lyrical Ballads, as demonstrated here, moments of clarity occur when the most unlikely of figures command attention, and it is the suffering of these lowly characters which illuminate not only the pressing need for assisting those on the brinks of society, but the general suffering innate to the human experience. [1] Articulated in Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude, at the time known as Letter to Coleridge[2] Ballads had in the latter half of the 18^th Century enjoyed major revivals through printed collections of Allan Ramsay, Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson (though none of these familiar folk narratives and old songs are really comparable to Lyrical Ballads)[3] In which the poet famously sets out a sort of personal poetics, venerated by Victorian critics such as Matthew Arnold as a ‘fount of wisdom’[4] Even in the introductory Letter to the first edition (1798) the human dimensions of the poem are emphasised above all else[5] 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads[6] Notwithstanding the explorations of mortality in poems such as The Childless Father and ‘Tis Said That Some Have Died For Love