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.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“To William Wordsworth” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1807)
Although more a response to the ideas and the argument of Wordsworth’s first drafts of what would become his masterwork The Prelude, this poem reveals the depth of the bond between these two poets. Their friendship was more a symbiotic relationship in which they helped each other grow as poets. This poem, then, illuminates the reasons why Wordsworth is so devastated by Coleridge’s departure in “A Complaint.”
“Ode on Melancholy” by John Keats (1819)
Taking their cue from Wordsworth, the Romantics loved to be sad: Melancholy seemed the most honest emotion. Part of the second great generation of Romantics who found in Wordsworth their mentor, Keats here sounds what becomes one of the characteristic emotions of the movement, how a poet handles loss. Sadness for Keats is inevitable in a world in constant flux. Embrace it, he argues, and celebrate that life has given you someone that dear to miss.
“To a Distant Friend” by William Wordsworth (1809)
A sort of companion piece to “A Complaint,” this poem sounds the idea of how separation creates yearning. The poet here demands ironically that the distant friend speak, shatter the silence in which the poet has been left. In the end, he compares himself to an abandoned bird’s nest filled with winter’s snow.
Further Literary Resources
“The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth” by Thomas McFarland (1972)
The fullest understanding of “A Complaint” is grounded in understanding the complex art and intellectual relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, a relationship that here is called the single most important friendship in the evolution of modern Western culture. Still considered a landmark article on this complicated subject, this essay using line by line analysis tests how difficult it is in the poet’s early works to define where Coleridge stops and Wordsworth begins.
“A New Kind of Poetry” by Emily Smith (2020)
Refreshingly free of the usual academic jargon, this article, a lengthy and illustrated review of a book-length study, lays out how Wordsworth and Coleridge in the years during which Wordsworth composed “A Complaint” (1804-1808) together created a new vision of poetry, how they argued the appropriateness of subject matters never before elevated to verse, how they reconceptualized poetic language to appeal to ordinary readers, and how in the process the two became a kind of synchronous single poet.
“An Analysis of Brotherly Love in William Wordsworth’s ‘A Complaint’” by A. L. Semarang (2014)
A detailed master’s thesis, this article examines frankly the nature of the love that centers the poem. Historians have long argued over the nature of the friendship that in “A Complaint” Wordsworth despairs over, specifically whether this is a friendship poem or unrequited love poem. This article draws on the historic context of Coleridge’s departure for Malta and Wordsworth’s frequent use of end-punctuation and dashes that suggest interruption and fragmentation to conclude ultimately we will never know exactly the relationship between the two poets.
Listen to Poem
Set to haunting piano music, the reading of the poem provided on YouTube by Pearls of Wisdom, a website devoted to offering a range of sensitive readings of brief lyrics, captures Wordsworth’s curious feeling of loss and love. The poem is read by a woman, which gives Wordsworth’s plaint an entirely new level of implication. The reading savors Wordsworth’s long vowels and hangs about all of Wordsworth’s fragments and dashes, conveying the poet’s sense of devastation and uncertain survival.
Related Titles
By William Wordsworth
