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.
Symbols & Motifs
A Fountain
The fountain “whose only business was to flow” (Line 4) symbolizes the powerful, urgent energy of the poet’s friendship with this Other. To a contemporary audience, the symbolism may seem a bit oblique, even obscure. To Wordsworth’s audience, however, fountains were an element of embellishment, a way to decorate homes with elegant style. Fountains were an essential expression of both taste and decorum. They had the ability to identify homes—unlike more practical expressions of waterworks that were part of homes, fountains were a luxury, a way to please the eye, the soul, rather than quench the thirst.
Thus, the speaker suggests that the friendship between him and this Other brought pleasure to him, delighted him with its effervescence and its animation. Much like the dancing and sparkling waters of a fountain, the love between the two appeared ceaseless—after all, who delights in the waters of a fountain and thinks the water might somehow, someday, someway turn off. The very kinetics of the water implies they will defy exhaustion. The water will play forever.
And for the poet, the waters of the fountain are consecrated, which ties the fountain of their love to the spiritually invigorating waters of Christian baptism. Those waters, like the delightful fountain, premises eternal life. That the fountain so suddenly dries up centers the emotional crux of the poem.
The Well
Unlike a very public fountain, a well is underground, distant, unavailable, really “comfortless and hidden” (Line 12). Unlike the decorative, playful fountain, a well is pragmatic, practical, useful. Wells are really no fun at all—but they sustain, they create the conditions of survival without promising much in the way of animation, liveliness, or joy. One drinks water from a well to live; one delights in plashing of water from a fountain because, well, it is delightful.
Herein lies the poet’s metaphoric argument. When “your love” (Line 2) was here, available and delightful, that energy was like a fountain that the poet took for granted. The energy of the friendship seemed ceaseless, invigorating, and delightful. But certainly he would not drink from the fountain or use its waters to bathe—that water was not supposed to sustain him. Rather that water was to delight. Now that his friend is gone, however, all he has are memories. Thus, the waters of the fountain have become the deep, still, silent water at the bottom of a well. He needs that water just to survive. When his friend was present, his friendship delighted the speaker; now that his friend is gone, the absent friend’s friendship sustains the speaker.
In using a well, Wordsworth affirms his belief that poetry speaks to the widest audience that draws on familiar objects. More than 50 years before the widespread use of indoor plumbing, the well was a common fixture for homes as well as towns. People depended on the water for hygiene, for drinking. To compare memories of love to getting water from a deep and distant well, Wordsworth communicated to his readers the reality of his emotional devastation.
Poverty
Given the emerging commercial influence of the middle class, Wordsworth constructs a metaphor around the dynamic of rich and poor, that is, the always uncertain fear in the middle class over the apparent stability and reliability of wealth against the reality of suddenly losing it. When poets before the Romantics spoke of wealth, they spoke to an elite class about the travails and tragedies of the mega-rich—kings and generals and landowners—for whom wealth was a constant, where the threat of poverty was abstract and inaccessible. Poverty was something for “them” not “us.” And the impoverished lower classes could not in turn grasp the concept of wealth that could be lost. For them, every day was defined by the struggle to live without. Only the middle class, the ‘EveryPeople’ Wordsworth saw as the legitimate subject for great poetry, they alone would grasp what it means to lose so swiftly and love so absolutely.
It is Wordsworth’s readers, the so-called ‘EveryPeople’, who grasp the reality of Wordsworth’s metaphor. “I am poor” (Line 1), the poem starts out. The immediacy and clipped and tight economy of the sentence registers with those who live perched within the too-quick spiral into poverty. The middle class understands the implications of that anxiety. Losing this friendship, the poet has lost wealth: “Such change, and at the door / Of my fond heart, hath made me poor” (Line 18). Poverty was no symbol for Wordsworth’s audience. Then as now, losing the security and stability of money is a drama that registers. Sudden penury was catastrophic and long-lasting. It was both humbling and humiliating. It was absolute and deeply personal.
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By William Wordsworth
