Royal Beggars

When reading “The Beggars,” was intrigued by the tension between Wordsworth’s descriptive language, which seems to place the vagabonds in positions of power and their actual lowly place in (or at the outskirts of) society. Wordsworth continues to describe the mother using diction related to royalty while her sons are crowned with wreathes and links her to masculine power when likening her to a man. I thought it was particularly clever how he portrayed the mother’s mantle as running “to her feet / descending with a graceful flow” as if garment was bowing to her. I considered that the function of this disconnect could be to show how far the beggars have fallen, but there is very little emphasis on their poor condition. Perhaps Wordsworth intends to show that the beggars do not occupy such a low position in society due to any intrinsic deficit. Yet in response to the beggar’s story he claims, “on our English land / Such woes, I knew, could never be,” which in addition to shedding doubt on the validity of their tale seems to suggest that English society is not the cause of their plight either. Instead, Wordsworth seems to engage in a sort of “othering” of the beggars as he relates the various vagrants to Amazons, Greek rulers or “winged precursors to Aurora’s car.”