Human Suffering in Wordsworth's Early Poetry

Human Suffering in Wordsworth's Early Poetry

On the whole, in the poetry Wordsworth wrote before 1805, human suffering is for the poet an inexplicable problem. He holds diverse attitudes toward it and explores it vigorously from shifting moods and points of view. His treatment of it can be roughly divided into three stages. Before 1798, the poet is impressed with the images of calamity, especially those caused by natural, social or political evils. He sympathizes with people in their afflictions and attempts with all efforts to incite one's sympathy by presenting the distress and helplessness of the sufferers. In the subsequent important period of the Lyrical Ballads, his interest in suffering characters is twofold. On the one hand, the calamities of human life and his sense of pathos aroused by them continue to take hold of him. On the other hand, he begins to be fascinated by the primary passions he finds in the rustic suffering people; he is delighted with the strength and beauty of the elementary affections of their hearts. As a result, his mood in treating the subject of suffering varies from exultant joy to melancholy sadness. In the following stage, which spans the years approximately from 1801 to 1804, Wordsworth's sense of death and ineluctable suffering grows continuously, but he also endeavors to reconcile himself to the feeling of pathos by looking into the mind to find the very power that would sustain one in suffering. There are in this stage some remarkable poems particularly dealing with the unflagging and indomitable power of man's mind in encountering adversities.