![]() On the evening before Luke is to leave, Michael takes Luke to a place on the side of mountain where he has been intending to erect a sheepfold.įather and son have a heart-to-heart talk, and Michael has Luke place the cornerstone, telling him that he will finish the sheepfold while Luke is away. ![]() The family struggles with this decision but believe it is the correct one. ![]() Good son that he is, Luke readily agrees to go. Michael determines that instead giving up part of his land, he will send Luke to work for some rich merchant until Luke can make enough money to pay off the debt. The narrative’s plot is quite simple: the family living close to nature is happy and content for many years, but when their son turned eighteen, a financial burden is laid on them from Michael’s having signed a document that made Michael liable for his brother’s son’s debts. Their land was situated in a valley, and the speaker has made the trip on foot and reports the difficulty of accessing such a lonely and desolate terrain. The opening of the poem describes the landscape on which the family of three lived and struggled. They are the essence of morality and happiness. And Luke their son is a model son, helping his parents in their arduous but rewarding life. Isabel is equally industrious, keeping her home, spinning wool and flax. Michael is an industrious, dedicated worker, who has learned the meaning of each shift in the sound of the wind. Michael and Isabel have lived on land he inherited for many years. Isabel is Michael’s wife, who is twenty years his junior, and Luke their son. The narrative features primarily three characters: Michael, an eighty-year old shepherd. An important relic in the poem is the sheepfold, which he reports still remains, “or rather the ruins of it.” He also alerts the readers that the sheepfold is very important to the poem’s narrative. The house was called Evening Star in his poem, but that name did not actually apply to that house but another one a bit farther north. He says that he wrote the poem at about the same time he wrote “The Brothers,” which was around 1800, when he was living in the house at Town-end, Grasmere, where his fictional characters live in the narrative. In a brief foreword to “ Michael,” Wordsworth explains the circumstances that prompted the poem. The speaker's purpose is to praise the rural life, lived close to nature. ![]() Wordsworth’s near-quietism rises to drama in his verse by its aspirational quality, just as his deathless hope, or hope in deathlessness, finds no secure basis in faith and doctrine until late in the poet’s career.William Wordsworth's "Michael" is a narrative, pastoral poem with 484 unrimed lines. Still, tangible things seen, and recalled, can also be our home if we live alongside them with humility and self-distance, welcoming what is given and craving no more. “Our destiny, our nature, and our home, / Is with infinitude-and only there / With hope it is, hope that can never die, / Effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something evermore about to be” (6:538-42). While admiring the patriotic magnanimity and modesty of his French acquaintance Michel Beaupuy, Wordsworth also claims that our destiny lies with things unseen and-less conventionally-with an indeterminate, ever-receding future. What abides on earth is the cardinal virtue related to hope, magnanimity, the greatness of soul that aspires to great things, as well as the countervailing virtue of humility. Wordsworth engages with the Christian wisdom of his day, wherein worldly wishes-for glory or wealth, permanence or improvement, adequate sensory pleasure-give way to super-sensual hope in eternity and infinity. ![]()
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