In Wordsworth's "The Thorn," the narrator retells a story about a woman who lost her baby, though the details vary as the narrator is victim to the gossip mill of the community. Similarly, the narrator goes to great lengths in the description of the thorn and its location on the mountain top, but not where that mountain is. After a lofty account of the thorn ("No leaves it has, no prickly points/ It is a mass of knotted joints") and its surroundings ("Not five yards from the mountain path/ This Thorn you on your left espy/And to the left, three yards beyond/You see a little muddy pond"), the narrator introduces the phrase, "an infant's grave" that begins the supernatural element of the ballad.
Not just an ancient, gnarled Thorn and scenic pond, the narrator's description turns eerie as he begins to outline the women in a scarlet cloak who cries over her lost child. Her howls of "Oh misery!" and "Oh woe is me!" indiciate a ghoulish presence that infects the natural scene and twists it into a supernatural site. After repeating the gossip surrounding the women's despairing tale, the narrator reveals he does not know much about the place, only watches from a distance "with my telescope/ To view the ocean wide and bright." Thus, the speaker merely builds up a ghostly story from the community rumors and his own distance observation. Despite continually saying, "I cannot tell how this may be," the speaker tells the haunted tale as he believes it to be true. By focusing on detail he can embellish instead of explaining concretely the linear order of events he creates a narrative that is based on myth and superstition rather than reality.
I definitely agree with you that this poem has its gothic tones, as elements of the supernatural certainly enhance the mystery and paint a vivid and rather interesting picture, but I wonder if there could be some sort of allegory in the imagery. The woman wears a read cloak and is burdened by a child. I'm wondering about the connection between the woman's red cloak (the petals of a rose) and the connecting metaphor to the gnarled mass, void of points and and leaves. It could be that her child (the thorn) was a "thorn in her side" so to speak and that since it has died, it's burden and power (the sharpness, jutting spikes) have since turned into a knotted mass, a grave marker for a dead plant/child. Wordsworth also capitalizes the word Thorn, almost as if it were a person.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your analysis of the poem. I think that Jamasaurus also brings up a good point, and the capitalized Thorn is as much a character within the poem as the woman and narrator. By capitalizing the plant, Wordsworth brings life to it. In Biblical scripture, there are many references to "thorns" as problems or ailments. There are many potential metaphors for the thorn, but they all represent a kind of pain. The loss of child is a pain in itself, both physically and psychologically. Through these things, pain itself becomes a character within the poem.
ReplyDeleteWordsworth was very careful to separate himself from the narrator of this poem in the 1800 publication. He says: "The character which I have here introduced speaking is sufficiently common. The Reader will perhaps have a general notion of it, if he has ever known a man, a Captain of a small trading vessel for example, who being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity or small independent income to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having little to do become credulous and talkative from indolence ; and from the same cause, and other predisposing causes by which it is probable that such men may have been affected, they are prone to superstition. On which account it appeared to me proper to select a character like this to exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind."
ReplyDeleteThis note suggests that Wordsworth wants his reader to concentrate on the narrator as much as Martha Ray--it is the narrator's susceptibility to superstition and rumor that creates the tension in the poem. The questions is: why does it matter that the narrator links Martha Ray to this old, dragged down, spikeless thorn? Why does it matter that he tells her story based on superstition and not reality?