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.
Themes
The Joy of Friendship
The poem reveals the joy of friendship. It is, granted, a difficult, even ironic strategy to illuminate the sheer joy of friendship that actually centers the emotional argument of Wordsworth’s poem by chronicling its absence. Given the poem’s melancholic tone and how the poet so carefully anatomizes his sense of loss, the poem argues the joy of friendship by laying out the poet’s emotions in the absence of that friendship. It is as if you learn the joy of freedom by reading a stark account of imprisonment. The poet wants to be sufficiently contented by having had the experience of that friendship—but the physical absence of that Other too deeply lacerates his heart.
The poem shares the agonies of a heart in recoil. Given the poet’s uncertain relationship with his own memories, the speaker never actually provides the context. We never share the joys of the friendship—those are memories that the speaker admits are too painful to dwell on. The departed person is defined solely by the second person pronouns in the first two lines, a definition that stays generic, distant, reflecting the poet’s own physical distance from that Other. After those opening two lines, the poem denies the absent Other any presence. The poet is left suspended between his memories of the joy of their friendship and his coming to terms with the heavy and cloaking feel of its absence.
Much like kicking through the rubble left behind by a massive hurricane, the poet suggests the power of that love by sharing what the loss of that friendship has left behind, a heart in ruins, the speaker left alone now, compelled to be content with memories. Those memories only remind him of the distance he is from his Other and how comfortless are those memories. The poet addresses the poem to this nameless absent Other, a strategy akin to a message in a bottle, a strategy that merely underscores the speaker’s loss of a friendship that had sustained him, nurtured him, and given him joy.
The Agony of Separation
Wordsworth begins his lamentation over the agony of separation with two statements: “There is a change—And I am poor” (Line 1). This theme by itself is the very stuff of some of the grandest narratives since Antiquity. Gods and goddess, kings and queens, military heroes—all suffer through the experience of separation. That separation narrative—lovers, families, friends torn apart—is freighted with grand consequences—entire cities may fall, battles lost, a House topple into ruin, states collapse. Separation in the literature before the advent of Romanticism found in that drama the stuff of epical impact. Separated lovers did not merely pine, they PINED, large-scaled torment, grand and dramatic, and supremely consequential.
Wordsworth misses his friend. That friendship is hardly the stuff of gods and kings. When dealing with the fate of empires and the potential fall of a powerful House, the drama of two friends parted withers to trivial. It is the insight of Wordsworth, which would emerge as a centering tenet of Romanticism, that such small-scale agonies, such pedestrian tragedies are, indeed, quietly significant and undramatically impactful. Long before the revolution in telecommunications and digital chat would render the time and the distance implied by separation inconsequential, for Wordsworth the agony he feels left alone from a friend who had nurtured him emotionally and psychologically leaves an emptiness that cannot be remedied but rather only described. Your absent love is like a well, its healing and nurturing water so far out of reach, so distant, so inaccessible the well might as well be dry. The poet asks the question that haunts him: Is the water in a deep well actually there? If it is so deep—that is, if our friendship is so spaced by distance—can that love still be said to be there? At once there and not there, at once living and dead, the poet’s love concedes to the dark reality of separation.
The Cold Comfort of Memory
A grown child heading off to college, a parent in hospice care, a lover who must attend to job responsibilities that involve travel, a best friend moves far away: It is a cliché of poems that explore the human experience of separation, whether because of disagreements or complicated commitments or supremely the separation of death, to remember the good times. It is the comfort extended to anyone reeling from the tectonic intrusion of absence.
It seems logical advice, to remember the good times. Confronted here with the gathering realization that this significant “You” is gone and that there is no evidence of a time for any return, the poet understands that a loving heart left so completely alone must draw comfort from memories of that friendship, experiences that collectively make this “You” an indispensable element of the speaker’s emotional health. If the poem is taken as a narrative of Wordsworth’s professional and personal relationship with Samuel Coleridge in the wake of Coleridge’s open-ended departure for the Mediterranean, there exists copious evidence of the experiences the two shared before Coleridge’s departure, experiences the poet could easily have shared in stanzas that reveled in the nostalgia of their bonding.
But the poet does not indulge in memories. Rather like some cottage owner having a deep hidden” (Line 12) “well” where the water is tantalizing near but really all but inaccessible, he exists now in “silence and obscurity” (Line 16). What matters? he demands in an anything-but-rhetorical question. Memories only make more pressing the agony of this separation. The poet then is left to borrow his analogy that is destitute, wanting, yearning. Memories, far from the stuff of comfort, remind the speaker only of what he had, what he took so completely for granted, and what is denied him now. In the presence of absence and in the absence of presence, memories comfort so much they wound.
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