CARMEN PASCUAL SASTRE

PAPER I

THE DUNGEON

W. Wordsworth

And this place our forefathers made for man!

This is the process of our love and wisdom,

To each poor brother who offends against us --

Most innocent, perhaps -- and what if guilty?

Is this the only cure? Merciful God!

Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up

By ignorance and poaching poverty,

His energies roll back upon his heart,

And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,

They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;

Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks --

And this is their best cure! uncomforted

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And friendless solitude, groaning and tears

And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,

By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of ever more deformity!

With other ministrations, thou, O nature!

Healest thy wandering and distempered child:

Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,

Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,

Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and a dissonant thing,

Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;

But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,

His angry spirit healed and harmonized

By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/3130

William Wordsworth,

The Dungeon , from Lyrical Ballads,

Bristol, 1798.

In this poem Wordworth complains about the cruelty of men. ‘ The Dungeon’ is a sad place, then it is a very visual title for such a poem, in addition to be the main topic of the poem.

Without any further analysis, the poem builds an image of sadness, death and pain on the reader, which most probably was the sensation that the author wanted the poem to create on his audience.

Wordsworth only uses once the word ‘dungeon’ within the poem. Nevertheless, when the reader sees the title, it functions as an introductory element.

The poet manifests his sorrow, his disbelief and his disagreement with the violence and the privacy of freedom through the criticism of the dungeon. Moreover, he condemns this place arguing that no person deserves such a cruel punishment. During the second paragraph, the poet claims that nothing good is waiting for the convicts in the dungeon. On the contrary, they will be probably executed. And on the last paragraph, he speaks about more beautiful things because, supposedly, the convicts are already death.

The meaning of the lines is quite clear, appart from the fact that the author does not say exactly that the convicts are killed. So, at this point it is up to the reader to think that the metaphors of happiness are referred to the eternal rest or to the relief of crying.

The author’s viewpoint is rather pessimistic. He defends liberty, so he is against this kind of enclosure and torture. As a romantic author, Wordsworth believed that the individual imagination permits freedom. For him, liberty was one of the essential goods for men.

Furthermore, the tone of the poem is fairly dark, serious, as a mirror of the author’s feelings. But there is a spark of irony during the last paragraph, he speaks about happy concepts but in a sad way.

As an interesting detail, it is striking the fact that the two entreaties, both in vocatives and exclamations, asking for help, are: ‘Merciful God’ and ‘O nature!’. Here then it is more than evident that the Nature is one of the main elements in the Romantic movement. Wordsworth is putting the Nature and God power at the same level. Something that is quite understandable if we take into account that this movement was born as one of the French Revolution consequences.

Romantic poets are irrational, they are interested in sensations, emotions… the feelings at the purest level, always related to the Nature.

Structurally the poem is divided into three paragraphs plus the title. The kind of line seems to be the iambic pentameter, the metrical norm for English poetry from the fifteenth century onwards. However, the two interrogations in the first paragraph and some exclamations break the metre, making the poem more similar to a free verse one.

Phonollogically, it is important to mention the full alliteration of the fricative /f/ in the first line forefather. And, relating to the form, there is also a parallelism at the beginning of the second paragraph, starting the two first lines with the same structure: and, adjective, substantive. Moreover, there is no rhyme in the poem.

As a key image, there is no need to look very deep inside the poem, because the main one is already on the title.’The dungeon’ is a word with a strong meaning, and with no doubt any person who reads the poem would imagine this image in his or her mind. Furthermore, the poem is full of metaphors, intelligent metaphors that allow the reader to imagine the cruelty of the captivity or no-freedom, for instance: ‘proaching poverty’ or ‘the benignant touch of love and beauty’.

Another stunning device is the contrast between the two first paragraphs and the last one. During the first and the second everything is dark and unhappy. So the reader understands that it is a melancholic poem. But, surprisingly, during the last paragraph the author writes about felicity and joyous images.

Personally, I think that this is a very effective way of shocking the reader. Such different images made me understand the meaning of the poem.

From my point of view, Wordsworth succeded in transmiting his feelings to the readers. It is a very visual poem, and because of the strong images it has, it is not too difficult to understand. Concluding, it is an adorable poem about an awful concept, which is the violation of the liberty.