7/26/2023 0 Comments Wordsworth michaelMichael determines that instead giving up part of his land, he will send Luke to work for some rich merchant until Luke can make enough money to pay off the debt. The narrative’s plot is quite simple: the family living close to nature is happy and content for many years, but when their son turned eighteen, a financial burden is laid on them from Michael’s having signed a document that made Michael liable for his brother’s son’s debts. Their land was situated in a valley, and the speaker has made the trip on foot and reports the difficulty of accessing such a lonely and desolate terrain. The opening of the poem describes the landscape on which the family of three lived and struggled. They are the essence of morality and happiness. And Luke their son is a model son, helping his parents in their arduous but rewarding life. Isabel is equally industrious, keeping her home, spinning wool and flax. Michael is an industrious, dedicated worker, who has learned the meaning of each shift in the sound of the wind. Michael and Isabel have lived on land he inherited for many years. Isabel is Michael’s wife, who is twenty years his junior, and Luke their son. The narrative features primarily three characters: Michael, an eighty-year old shepherd. An important relic in the poem is the sheepfold, which he reports still remains, “or rather the ruins of it.” He also alerts the readers that the sheepfold is very important to the poem’s narrative. The house was called Evening Star in his poem, but that name did not actually apply to that house but another one a bit farther north. He says that he wrote the poem at about the same time he wrote “The Brothers,” which was around 1800, when he was living in the house at Town-end, Grasmere, where his fictional characters live in the narrative. In a brief foreword to “ Michael,” Wordsworth explains the circumstances that prompted the poem. The speaker's purpose is to praise the rural life, lived close to nature. Blessed are, therefore, the shepherds like Michael who breathed:While celebrating the poem in association with nature, Wordsworth’s goal was to bring forth nature’s real relationship with humans which made him also the ‘Poet of man’.William Wordsworth's "Michael" is a narrative, pastoral poem with 484 unrimed lines. Therefore, enjoying the beauty of nature is an expression of joy felt in the spirit of man– a feeling that Wordsworth perpetually experienced. Spirit of God manifests in the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of Man is a replica of that in Nature. (51)It seems to be a hierarchy of thought that Wordsworth implies while relating three elements of the universe: God, Nature, and Man. Sir Ifor Evans argues quite realistically:It may be that his vision of nature was an illusion, but in recording it he pursued many experiences into the secret corners of man’s nature so that few sensitive minds will fail to discover in his poems something that answers to their own intuitions. He not only celebrates and experiences the beauty of nature but also senses a unique familiarity with which man and nature are bonded with a similar expression of love and God’s grace. And indeed, for this reason, he writes:This emphasis of nature in this and other poems are often noticed in his elaborate, pictorial and vivid description of the same. The understanding, experience and the proximity of man with nature define spiritual realization. Nature is a part of human life that is connected with the spirit of God. We shall prove how this work of Wordsworth fits as a ‘poem of nature’, an investigation and examination of human life, the choice of intuition against reason and pastoral against urban and a transcendental spiritual truth – all of which are the features of Romanticism.‘Michael’ is famous for embodying a feature that Wordsworth is particularly popular for – the feature of ‘nature poetry’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |