Wordsworth
"Michael: A Pastoral Poem" (1800 [1800])

[From: Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989]

"In Home at Grasmere [Wordsworth] had recognized the lure of the Arcadian myth and dismissed it, dwelling on stories of the inhabitants of Grasmere which reveal that they of course share the human lot of pain. At one point he exclaims:

Is there not

An art, a music and a stream of words

That shall be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Shall speak of what is done among the fields,

Done truly there, or felt, of solid good

And real evil, yet be sweet withal,

More grateful, more harmonious than the breath,

The idle breath of sweetest pipe attuned

To pastoral fancies?

Michael is Wordsworth's answer to 'pastoral fancies'. This is an English pastoral. Every schoolboy knew where sheep grazed in Theocritus and Virgil. Now Wordsworth re-sites the pastoral on the Lake District hills. Pope had written about Daphnis, Strephon, and Damon, adhering to the genre's dictate: 'We must use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and it concealing its miseries'. Wordsworth writes about Michael, Isabel, Luke, whose life consists of steady labor, by day and night, just to hang on to all they have, their little tract of land. In the end their efforts are obliterated and nothing is left but the oak

That grew beside their Door; and the remains

Of the unfinished Sheep-fold . . .

Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Gill.

But memories of them do survive and in the poem have found permanent form. Michael is the greatest of the poems in which Wordsworth drew Grasmere to himself. It is also his finest celebration of the values of fortitude, constancy, and love he believed he found there" (Gill 182)

From personal notes
3. Michael
	a. Mother, Father, & Child
	b. told by narr. oddly paralleled w/father
		-primarily through father
		-only quotes of father
			nothing of son
	c. unfinished sheep fold never finished
		-should it have been built
		-in 1st place by the terms in which
			it was to be built
	d. 341-353 W.W. "Most imaginative lines he had
		ever written"
C. The Solitary Reaper
*music something deep in language
1. Deal w/limit of language
2. last stanza dead rhyme
	a. sang & work
3. self & field
4. music fills up every container
	a. why linked with probl. of mortality
	b. all flesh is grass
D. Michael is an answer to question posed by
	Christabel
	1. replaced
	2. also deals w/families

IV. Michael
A. Meter: not free verse- unrhymed, unmetered
	1. Iambic Pentameter p. 275
		a. laying of the cornerstone
		b. laying his bond
		c. puts into voice his fears
	2. fractured text about building of a monument
		a. unequally fragmented
		b. construction of relationships
	3. have no word from Luke
B. The moment of non-building, a kind of monument
C. not continuing sheep fold
	1. heroic refusal to build on hopes that were
		build on hopes that were built on failure
	2. a monument to insight
D. P. 256 W.W.
	1. A rift opening
	2. Time opening & closing, construct w/ words a
		monument for the spirit
	3. Committing himself to the tomb of his poetry
	4. hesitation in the voice

E. Substance, matter, & meaning
	1. can see a rift
	2. perform perfect iambic pentameter
		a. don't hear in the voice
	3. Echoes of Dejection
		a. But lady we give.....
F. When another peers into the container & there is a
	rift for another spirit to dwell, can discover
	things could not have known
	1. paired words & repetitions
	2. there is a closure & yet an infinitude

Begin the Begin