A Complaint

On its face, “A Complaint” hardly seems revolutionary. Indeed, for a contemporary reader, Wordsworth’s plaint about a profound love that is now gone looks like conventional poetry; read aloud with its careful rhythm and dutiful rhymes, it scans like a conventional poem. Given its ornate and clever metaphors that fuse a fountain with a well, and given its elegant syntax, it even reads like conventional poetry. The poem also explores the complicated emotional trauma of a hypersensitive poet willing to lay bare the most intimate of his emotions.

The emotional aspect of the poem, however, is exactly what makes the poem revolutionary. For a contemporary reader, that a poem shares the innermost emotions of the poet seems conventional. At the time of its publication, however, the poem epitomized a sea-change in the cultural perception of poetry and its function, a radical upending of more than a century of principles that had shaped what was for the British people the very essence of their cultural identity. This was not a sage poet handing down wisdom or delighting in lampooning humanity’s foible with snarky irony and cutting wit. Poetry appealed to the intellect, argued points with elegant and clever daring. Poetry was designed to avoid the messy personal lives of the poets. Poetry aspired to be impersonal, drawing clear lines around the poet’s own private life and elevating the Poet (with a capital P) to a public figure. The elect, these Poets, offered the reassurance that among the British people were those gifted not only with profound insight but as well with the skills to sculpt lines that rendered such wisdom elegant and elevated.

In short, Wordsworth’s emotional poetics were not those of, say, Alexander Pope. Infused by the radical spirit of the political revolutions that rocked Europe during Wordsworth’s tour of the Continent, his poetry upended assumptions about poetry to offer a radical new perspective into poetry’s very purpose. Poets are not larger-than-life figures with extraordinary insights into humanity directed to engage an upper-class, elite audience of educated readers. Poets, Wordsworth argues, are people. They struggle to find purpose in their lives; they find delight in the simplest expressions of nature; they experience the ironies and agonies, joys and sorrows of falling in and then out of love. These subjects are fit for expression into poetry. Maintaining the tradition of the poem as a sculpted thing, Wordsworth nevertheless upended poetry by suggesting that how deeply he missed a friend could be elevated into poetry.

How will the poet live without the love of some unnamed other who abruptly has left? For the poet to grapple with the implications of his loss, the emptiness in his heart, he turns to metaphor. Without entirely understanding the richness he had, that is, by “not taking heed” (Line 5) of the bounty he had found, the poet had taken the friendship for granted. It was like a fountain at his very door—there always, reassuring, animated, lively, spirited. Their friendship was like the fountain’s plashy waters: “murmuring, sparkling, living” (Line 10).

The suddenness of the loss of that friendship, suggested by all end-punctation and by the multiple dashes that break up lines, compels a change in metaphor. Now that once lively fountain is more like a well. Yes, the poem argues, the water, which symbolizes love, might be just as strong as before, but it is now distant, inaccessible, “comfortless and hidden” (Line 12). The poet struggles to reassure himself that love, after all, is still love, that such powerful friendship can sustain the challenge of distance. But is love that is so silent and obscure still love? His brave logic in the end cannot console him. His “fond heart,” so full of affection, is left “poor” (Line 18).

To Wordsworth’s contemporary readers, the poem, which leaves the poet in such a perplexing and sorrowful dilemma, would raise confusion. Where is the cool logic of solution, the tonic gift of insight? Nothing is resolved. No wisdom is gained to provide illumination to life’s challenges. For Wordsworth, poetry does not illuminate—it reveals; and poets do not teach—they share. Because Wordsworth leaves tantalizingly vague the context of the poem, the angst of a heart suddenly left alone speaks to any reader who has lost connection with someone they assumed would never leave and whose love they had come to take for granted: family members, friends, professional associates, lovers. The poet cannot make the pain, the uncertainty, the loneliness go away through the exertion of the intellect—that was the fantasy premise of a century of Neo-Classical poetry. Poetry was no longer a classroom with the Poet pontificating on how to live rightly—poetry was now more like a support group. The poet here anatomizes a sorrow everyone feels. See, the poet says in all but words, we are in this together.