Reading William Wordsworth (III)

“Ruth” is a moving poem and would be merely tragic except for this idea of maintaining the wonders of childhood. It draws on the conclusions of “Nuns Fret Not” and “My Heart Leaps up”. It begins in her childhood and skips to her falling for a man from America, who seems to have tamed the wilds of the West, but he abandons her, so that she has to be placed in mental institution, but she gradually regains the practice of her youth of living in Nature. One might argue that she has merely gone insane, but not for Wordsworth. It is a bleak comfort for her and for himself that she who has lost so much can regain comfort in the world outside.

When Ruth was left half desolate,

Her Father took another Mate

It could be that Ruth’s mother took off (which would mirror her spouse’s abandonment), but it sounds like her mother died. Nor does it sound like the child was paid much attention to once the father remarried, calling her “slighted,” so she turns to nature “In thoughtless freedom, bold.” She makes a straw pipe playing sounds that mimicked nature’s winds and floods. She plays there enough until it’s as if she were born there, her natural habitat:  “an infant of the woods.” In her father’s she only “seemed to live” while “Herself he own delight; / Pleased with herself.”

Interestingly, she doesn’t grow to become a woman but “grew to woman’s height” which might be a good thing according to Wordsworth. She marries the American, is abandoned and goes mad in this awful yet wonderfully worded way:

with many a doleful song

Made of wild words, her cup of wrong

She fearfully caroused.

She becomes a vagrant, begging for food, living in nature or in a barn during the winter and, to cheer herself, plays a flute made of hemlock stock (hemlock is a poison, so it’s bittersweet), until

Among the fields she breathed again:

The master current of her brain

Ran permanent and free

The Lucy poems together constitute a lyric sort of narrative that many have found sad yet pleasing as the speaker mourns the death of Lucy. The poems are largely self-explanatory. I’ve seen them arranged differently, so it’s hard to tell their best arrangement. However, “Strange Fits of Passion” seems to suggest the speaker merely imagines her dead: “If Lucy should be dead!” which is the last line which may explain the first: “Strange fits of passion.” He imagines her dead and so the horse quickens its pace. It isn’t clear, though, if the pace quickens because of the speaker, of the horse (eager to get home) or of the horse sensing the speaker’s passion.

Alternately, if Lucy dies prior to the speaker’s being told and he senses it somehow, that would be strange—even supernatural.