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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem reveals the joy of friendship. It is, granted, a difficult, even ironic strategy to illuminate the sheer joy of friendship that actually centers the emotional argument of Wordsworth’s poem by chronicling its absence. Given the poem’s melancholic tone and how the poet so carefully anatomizes his sense of loss, the poem argues the joy of friendship by laying out the poet’s emotions in the absence of that friendship. It is as if you learn the joy of freedom by reading a stark account of imprisonment. The poet wants to be sufficiently contented by having had the experience of that friendship—but the physical absence of that Other too deeply lacerates his heart.
The poem shares the agonies of a heart in recoil. Given the poet’s uncertain relationship with his own memories, the speaker never actually provides the context. We never share the joys of the friendship—those are memories that the speaker admits are too painful to dwell on. The departed person is defined solely by the second person pronouns in the first two lines, a definition that stays generic, distant, reflecting the poet’s own physical distance from that Other. After those opening two lines, the poem denies the absent Other any presence.
By William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Daffodils
Daffodils
William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
Tintern Abbey
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
William Wordsworth
London, 1802
London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
My Heart Leaps Up
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
William Wordsworth
She Was a Phantom of Delight
She Was a Phantom of Delight
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us
The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
To the Skylark
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth