10/5 "The Ruined Cottage"
I think Wordsworth's poem serves several different purposes, and the two things that stood out to me was the idea that the things a man loves will deteriorate when he is no longer there, and the obliviousness of nature to human suffering.
Before the Wanderer even begins his story about Margaret he tells the narrator that not only do men die, but "that which each man loved and prized in his particular nook of the earth/ dies with him, or is changed" (33). Everything that the man left behind gradually decayed, and as the home deteriorated so did the wife and children. Margaret held out till the end with a "torturing hope" that he would return, and kept the man's loom in its place and his clothes hung where he left them. This could be read as critical towards women's position in society, since she had the loom sitting there but did not use it, and the Wanderer points out that he "left her busy with her garden tools" (258) and yet her garden doesn't last.
The images of nature taking over the cottage is present throughout the poem, like when the honeysuckle was "crowding round the porch" or how the yellow stone-crop "profusely grew,/ blinding the lower panes" (282), even the peas in the garden are strangled by weeds. The narrator appears to not see this as such a positive thing, at the end of the story he sees "the secret spirit of humanity" still surviving amid the "oblivious tendencies of Nature". The Wanderer, who sees things others can't, is more interested in meditating on the calming and peaceful feeling that the weeds they're looking at offer and not the sorrow that death and ruin bring. This awareness of Nature allowed the Wanderer to walk along his road in happiness, despite the grief he felt about the woman (520). To me this is a perfect example Wordsworth as a poet of nature.
What I find interesting is that I took a different view that what you did on what caused the deterioration. It wasn't the lack of man, but the lack of love that caused it. She no longer had love in her life which caused her life and the cottage to deteriorate. But, that is just my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI also found it interesting on what the lack of a man, and everything left in his shadow, represented. As we can allude, Margaret is a woman of sensibility rather than substance. Even when she tries to make something of herself by getting work, which she can't do until both of her children are gone (also hinting to a woman's position in society and it's lack of flexibility and potential) she still wanders and wastes away like her home and garden. It's really allegorical in that way. I feel like it's adamantly pointing out the sexes positions in society, and giving us a point of view with which to be sympathetic towards women and their oppressed position. While these men, the narrator, the listener, and her husband get to be free and live as they please, Margaret is bound to this house and her husband's absence and left with little foundation or substance to stand on. So she suffers as does the superficial 'beauty' of her house with overgrown nature rather than the groomed nature of a woman's hand.
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