Friday, October 28, 2011
In "The Beggars," Wordsworth talks about a striking beggar woman and two children he believes are hers. He is struck by her appearance: she is brown from the sun, tall, and with a cap "as white as new-fallen snow." As a beggar, she is on the outskirts of society, yet Wordsworth implies she is more a part of the landscape than anything else. The sun has changed her, and her white cap is even compared to snow. She is like a queen to him, possibly because he finally takes notice of her above the other beggars that he has not noticed before. She is like a "weed of glorious feature," beautiful but destroying the other beauty around her by taking over the landscape, as beggars take over their landscape and do not belong there. He leaves her and sees two children with her same features and thinks they are hers. Their hats are of flowers, like crowns, and are not manmade as their mother's hat is. They are more intertwined with nature because they are children and innocently still playing games instead of doing their duty to collect money for their family. They stick out to him because of their resemblance to the woman. He remembers the woman and takes her with him, somewhat like when he takes the memory of the daffodils with him in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." The boys are scattering fresh flowers and are happy "to hunt their fluttering game o'er rock and level green." They are children of the land, more a part of it than their mother. When he asks about their mother, they say she is dead, probably a technique used to get money. Then they leave him when he begins to argue with them. He leaves the mother after giving her money, yet the boys leave him without money. They are more concerned with their place in the natural world, their play in the rocks and green, instead of their lowly place in society as beggars for money. They are compared to royalty because they are set apart from the rest of their class to him, and he is able to see a different perspective in their ties to nature that he had not noticed before. They are not the lowly scum society believes them to be because they are part of the English landscape.
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Nature and the Überkind
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I think Cole's point about the children being closer to nature is really interesting. If we extrapolate this to consider nature as a whole, the Wordsworth is suggesting a somewhat innocent and fleeting nature, rather than a more ominous view. Furthermore, this would mean that even the lowest levels of society can be used to illustrate characteristics of nature, which I think is an interesting possibility.
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