READING MODULE
William Wordsworth, “Old Man
Travelling” from “Lyrical Ballads, 1978.
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought -- He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
-- I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
"And there is dying in an hospital."
The poem
that I chose to analyse (Old Man Travelling) from William Wordsworth’s “Lyrical
Ballads”, seems on the surface to be about an old man who is travelling on his
own to take leave of his son. However, at a deeper level Wordsworth is highlighting the loneliness which men suffer
in the course of our life.
First of
all, as I mentioned before, one of the main ideas of the poem is that men are
born alone and we remain alone during our lifetime. This idea, connected to the
romantic conception of the man, being himself in contact with nature, is
patently obvious in the first four verses of the poem, where the poet is using
the image of “little birds” and above all, the explanation of the traveller’s
expression, the way he walks and even the fact that he is not moving with pain,
but absorbed in his own thoughts.
A second
remarkable idea is the one that the poet expresses in the tittle: “Animal
Tranquility and Decay”. This is, our condition as human beings allows us to be
conscious of the fact that we decay in the same way nature does, but the
diffecence is that birds and nature cannot be conscious of it (so, they are
just what they are, they cannot feel) and we are conscious of our limitations
as human beings. Furthermore, it is not by chance that the protagonist is
exactly an old man, one ”by whom all the effort seems forgotten”. The traveller
is completely quiet walking and he is completely aware of the fact that he accepts his son dying in a
short period of time, in the same way he is going to die as well some day,
because our condition as human beings allows us to appreciate the pleasure
of being part of the wonderful nature,
but also implies that our irremediable final fate is going to be our death.
The old
traveller seems to assume perfectly this intrinsic human condition because he
answers normally when the poet himself as a narrator asks him about the
objective of his travel (in the second stanza). The traveller tells the poet
that he is going to “take the last leave of his son because he is dying in a
hospital”. He shows a perfect harmony with the nature sourrounding him.
In my
opinion, the poem is completely straightforward in meaning, because the poet is
able to reflect perfectly this real connection between traveller and nature
(first stanza) and the acceptance of
his son’s death without pain as a consequence on being part of this nature.
On the other
hand, the structure of the poem is quite simple. It is divided into two
stanzas, the first one contains twelve lines and the second one contains eight
lines with free rhyme. Wordsworth is the narrator and even in the second
stanza, he participates having a conversation with the protagonist.
The poem is
written in a very accessible language. The poet makes use of direct speech at the end to transmit the
meaning of the poem to the reader by involving him into the situation. Finally,
Wordsworth uses two archaic words in two occasions: the use of “hath” ,which
means “has” and “doth” , which is “does”; also the use of the old-fashioned
expression “to take a last leave of my son”, which is to say goodbye to someone
because he is dying. He uses the adjective “old” in the tittle. He wants to
highlight the decay suffered by human being. The one which is painful for most
part of people, but not for the old traveller.
As a
conclusion, I would like to say that I chose this poem because it was really shocking for me the way in which
Wordsworth deals with so delicate a topic as it is decay and death. I really
like the meanig of the poem because all of us make up a whole, which is the
nature.