Wordsworth And Writing His Defense

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r who refuses to comfort her. Immediately you think that the daughter is selfish and uncaring. However, you then discover that the woman has never really been a mother to her daughter; she spent most of her child’s youth at bars and on dates. The daughter had been passed from father to father, never having any kind of emotional relationship with her mother. Now it is up you to decide whether the daughter is in fact being selfish by not helping her mother through her illness, or if it is the mother who is being selfish by asking the daughter to be there because it is now convenient for her to be a mother. In order for you to make a decision, you must leave yourself and become either the mother or the daughter. Now, since you are in their mind, you are able to back up your decision based on both fact and emotion; and in effect, when you retell the story, it will seem bias because you now have an emotional connection with the subject. In a spiritual sense, you have made an “upward progression from soul, to consciousness to mind”; and having been through this, your understanding of your self has changed and you are now able to think in a new way. (Conger). This is the way Wordsworth was able to write these poems from a mother’s perspective.
In order for Wordsworth to depict the emotional aspects of motherhood and female tribulations from a woman’s perspective he abandons his mental and physical male body and in a spiritual sense, a takes on the physical, emotional and social views of his female characters. It is important to consider that Wordsworth's purpose in the Lyrical Ballads was that the poet should "…let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs [the character's]; modifying only the language." (1800 Preface 14).
Specifically, these two poems deal with a troubled mother and Wordsworth's wonder at the mother-child relationship and its uniqueness. Words...