Woman of Heart and Mind

Wordsworth's The Complaint takes the voice of a dying Indian woman as her final speech. The woman has been left by her tribe to die alone because she is too sick and weak to continue traveling. Interesting is the overall themes she speaks of that seem to be predictable of a dying last speech and encompass universal values. She isn't afraid of physical death (common at death) and wishes to "let my body die away" in order to rid any suffering. She can foster no joy or pleasure in life, not even "for clothes, for warmth, for food, and fire" and therefore, sees no reason to live while simultaneously acknowledging her inevitable fate.

Next, the Indian woman saddeningly recants about losing her child, who now is being cared for by another tribal member. She not only worries and is sad about losing her child but also expresses that the child should not "weep and grieve for me." Here, there is a nurturing and contemplation over loved ones in the face of death. Finally, the woman expresses that her friends left too soon and she sparks a fighting will to find them, where she'll "follow you across the snow" but realizes the attempt is futile due to her weakness. At the end of the poem, she accepts and longs for death once again by saying "let my body die away." This final segment of the poem indicates the fighting human will for survival but then an obviously chilled realization that full of pain, wishes it to end, and is to weak to maintain life.

What we have in this poem is a last speech, whose themes are fairly predictable. The Indian woman goes from longing to die because of her suffering, to caring and thinking about her child, to ambitiously swearing survival, and finally accepting death as an inevitable. Wordsworth presents a process to which someone may experience before meeting death as well as some universal human values that the reader may empathize with. The Indian woman is no longer be seen as a race or gender inferior (to Wordworth's white audience) but a woman of heart and mind.