This poem was fairly interesting in its way of portraying
both the thorn and Martha Ray. The poem starts with the first two stanzas
describing the thorn as “old and grey” (4) and “a mass of knotted joints” (8).
The next three stanzas show what is around the thorn, the pond, the hill, the
mountain it is on. Wordsworth makes a point of focusing on the hill in stanzas
four and five, describing it with beautiful detail. After that we are
introduced to Martha Ray and what happened in her life, such as her falling in
love, being jilted by her lover, giving birth and the eventual death of her
child. The poem then ends with her repeating the phrase ‘Oh misery! oh misery!
Oh woe is me! oh misery!’ (252-253)
I see
a possible parallel between the thorn and Martha Ray such as how both represent
protection. Martha Ray, a mother, is shown going to the hill and is believed to
be mourning the death of her child at its supposed. In a way, she is acting
like a thorn by watching over and protecting the place from anyone from really
going there. In much the same way, the thorn itself is meant to symbolize this means
of protection yet doesn’t have anything to protect. From what I read there isn’t
a flower or plant that it is defending so it just sits there, all its points are
worn away and is covered in moss and lichen. Both are also are heavy with
something, as the thorn is referred to being pulled down by the weight of the
moss covering it and Martha is weighed down by her sadness after losing her child.
In the 1800 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth adds this note about the poem’s narrator:
ReplyDelete"The character which I have here introduced speaking is sufficiently common. The Reader will perhaps have a general notion of it, if he has ever known a man, a Captain of a small trading vessel for example, who being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity or small independent income to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having little to do become credulous and talkative from indolence ; and from the same cause, and other predisposing causes by which it is probable that such men may have been affected, they are prone to superstition."
Your question here is crucial: the poem is as much “about” the conflicting viewpoints presented as it is about Martha Ray and her dead baby. The central crux of the poem is the narrator, as Wordsworth’s elaborate note to the poem suggests.
ReplyDeleteIn trying to differentiate between himself and the poem’s narrator, Wordsworth is asking us to consider why this narrator and his propensity to gossip and superstition are important to the poem. The opening stanzas appear to give information about the thorn, the pond, the moss and so on from an objective stance; he describes the appearance of the thorn, measures the pond and its distance from the path, and provides details about the heap of moss. Even though this description seems empirical (ie. something supplied by observation of the objects as they appear), the metaphors and similes suggest that the narrator is projecting parts of the story onto these objects. As Martha Ray’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that it is a fabric of gossip—as you note, the poem is full of reported speech (149, 163-4, 214, 225) and claims that “no one knows” what actually happened to the child (162). Turning the story back on the opening stanzas, it becomes clear that the narrator has imported elements of the story into his empirical description, bending the scene to fit his understanding of the social context with which it is associated. The narrator calls the thorn “a wretched thing forlorn,” which links it to Martha Ray’s isolation and her cry, “Oh misery! oh misery!” (9, 65); the heap of moss appears woven “as if by hand of lady fair” and “like an infant’s grave in size” (41, 52). The narrator has read the scene and the objects through Martha Ray’s story, literalizing her objectification by her community by making her life into the relation between a set of objects.