NPPF:CANTO ONE - MAUD Pt. 2 of 2

[charles albert]

Now that that incest thing has been resolved.....







Twenty-one years old, unemployed, homeless, with tentative finances, Wordsworth rambled about London and Wales over the next months, continuing to turn down decent job offers and career prospects. The only vague idea he could come up with was to go to France to pick up the language so that he might become a tutor. Within four or five months of his arrival at the end November 1791, a French woman he met was pregnant by him. So too did he come under the heady sway of revolutionary ideas. At the same stressful moment, then, Wordsworth was witness to the frightening and unpredictable growth of the French revolution and equally uncertain growth of his lover. He returned to England just weeks before his daughter was born. The mother, Annette Vallon, expected Wordsworth would return to her; Wordsworth's expectations were less certain.

So much for the idealized early years: a stressed-out mother, an overworked father laboring for a hated boss, nasty relatives, the death of the mother, the break-up of the siblings, the death of the father, no sense of home; financial uncertainty, since it turned out that his father never received payment for his work for Lowther (it took two decades for the children to finally collect on the debt); an expensive education but, despite strong family pressure, a refusal on Wordsworth's part to take advantage of his considerable connections or to plan for his future; all topped off by child fathered out of wedlock, left behind in country his own would soon be gearing up for war with.

A few months after leaving Annette, Wordsworth may have suffered a nervous breakdown. Wordsworth, of course, knew all about feelings of abandonment and loss, and he must have felt strong stirrings of guilt when, in March 1793, she wrote to him: "Come, my love, my husband, and receive the tender embraces of your wife, of your daughter .... She grows more like you every day. I seem to be holding you in my arms." At this time, he also began to write poetry dwelling on individual human suffering and enigmatic feelings of guilt, isolation, and loneliness...

As for the incest? Not likely. Try co-dependence.

http://www.mtsn.org.uk/staff/staffpages/cer/wordsworth/intro_to_wordsworth.htm
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