18 pages • 36 minutes read
William WordsworthA Complaint
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1807A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
Despite its introduction of radical elements into the province of poetry—namely, the private emotional turmoil of the poet—“A Complaint” is a conventional and, for Wordsworth’s time, recognizable poetic form that actually dated back to Renaissance Italy and the sonnets of Petrarch (1304-1374).
The poem is executed in three sestets, or stanzas of six lines. Each sestet closes in a period and hence each sestet furthers the argument. Indeed, each sestet can be read as a sort of stand-alone poem. The first is about the happiness of friendship, the second the reality of the loss of friendship, and the third the impact of being left alone.
The first sestet renders the poem’s exposition. Here the poet lays out the happiness that had been his, set against that abrupt opening line. For the reader to understand the depth of the change, the poet first revels in the delight the friendship gave him. The second sestet shatters that sense of delight. This sestet pivots on the word “Now” (Line 9), introducing the critical temporal dimension of the poem. The poem pivots in the middle of a stanza, not at the beginning of one as might be expected. The shift in the middle of the sestet emphasizes the enormity of the change and how the change so deeply interrupted what the poet has assumed was love unending. In the closing sestet, the poem examines the implications of the loss of friendship. The closing sestet provides the poem’s most despairing note. What does it matter if the speaker’s friend is alive and well and happy but not with him?
Meter
The poem is rendered in a regular meter: Each line is set in iambic tetrameter, that is, each line has eight syllables, four units of unstressed-stressed units of two beats. Despite the shattered emotional life of the poet, one can clap along to the lines given their regularity and their beat.
Given the poet’s devastation, such regular and anticipated beat may seem incongruous, even ironic. The recitation of the poem, evidenced by the dozens of readings of it available on YouTube, can encourage a kind of ruthless, singsong delivery completely out of sync with the poet’s confession of despair.
And it would be if the beat were regular. Wordsworth refuses to allow the reading to get swept up in the happy, familiar meter. Key to the poem’s aural impact are the end-stops. The third lines of each stanza alone lack end punctuation, a comma or a semi-colon or a period. In addition, each sestet is its own self-contained unit of argument, further fragmenting the poem. Finally, the poet deploys dashes, sometimes in the middle of the lines (Lines 1, 13, and 14), and once at the beginning of a line (Line 17). The dash is a most unconventional and unexpected punctuation mark. In the closing sestet alone there are four. Dashes, along with end-punctuation and autonomous stanzas, recreate rather than render ironic the feeling of fragmentation and separation that has spiraled the poet into despair. A careful recitation inevitably stumbles against and through such metrical subtlety.
Voice
Because of the heavy pressure of biography, the voice is presumed to be Wordsworth speaking to a “you”—presumably the absent Coleridge away on distant Malta. Although that certainty can be used to define the voice, the poem itself does little to demand that definition.
The poem is a meditation, not a confession. The poet is thus speaking not for himself and his narrow experience but rather, in avoiding making specific the nature of his particular loss, allows the poet to speak on behalf of anyone confronting the sudden hard reality of a loss of a person they never imagined would be gone. The poem has been read as a lament for a dead family member, the departure of a lover, the loss of a friend, etc. The “you” has even been applied to a gorgeous landscape that lives now only in the poet’s memory or a lament by a formerly stout Christian who now feels alienated from the God that once gave him so much stability.
The poem then is about loss and separation, and not just Wordsworth’s loss of Coleridge and the traumatic separation from a friend both sensitive and sympathetic to Wordsworth’s conception of poetry. The voice speaks for all readers. The poem is an anatomy of any “fond heart” (Line 18) traumatized into vulnerability by the feelings of loneliness and alienation.
Related Titles
By William Wordsworth
