Lyrical Ballads was a revolutionary text, and meant to be. Wordsworth and Coleridge intended not a playful experimentation with poetry, as they claimed after the 1798 edition of LB, but indeed a paradigmatic shift in the way poetry was conceived and in the very language in which it was written. Explains Wordworth in his Preface to the 1801 version of LB, "If the object which I have proposed to myself were adequately attained, a species of poetry would be produced which is genuine poetry, in its nature well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations" (Wu 363). He further fleshed this idea of genuine poetry by insisting that poetry be written in the language of man and defining poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...emotions recollected in tranquility" (Wu 361).

In other words, Wordsworth and Coleridge placed a burden of redefining poetry on their text, desiring the poems within LB to demonstrate by example this redefinition. It is arguable whether or not such grand schemas for poetry are possible, and problematic as to whether or not such idealistic notions of poetry make for good poems. Coleridge's poems may lack coherence despite his lofty attempts at unifying incongruent opposites, and flounder from narrators that are too much with us. And Wordsworth's poems struggle with not only overbearing narrators, but also syrupy didacticism, and often a fundamental disconnection from the common people he intends to illuminate.

Thus, in such poems as "We Are Seven" and "The Idiot Boy" we are thrust as readers into a world in which the narrator himself seems only vaguely to be part. While Wordsworth expounds at length how he intends to be a man speaking to men--how he longs to show that "low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil which they can attain their maturity" (Wu 357)--he seems to be a man speaking at men rather than to them. Moreover, the narrative voice in both "We Are Seven" and "Idiot Boy" seems to be condescending in his relations with even the simple, rustic folk Wordsworth so esteems. The narrator in "We Are Seven" describes the child as "simple" (1) and points out that her "rustic woodland air"(9) which "made [him] glad" (12), but never seems to connect with the child beyond his idealized notions about her. He listens without hearing and attempts to crush her childish, rustic naivete with his final exclamation,"But they are dead--those two are dead!" (65). And in "Idiot Boy", whatever Wordsworth's abiding appreciation for the simpletons in society, he never allows us to actually connect with the idiot boy. Although Wordsworth remarks that "I have indeed often looked upon the conduct of fathers and mothers of the lower classes of society towards idiots a great triumph of the human heart"(qt. in Wu 249), he does not delve into the personality and emotion behind those triumphs of the heart on which he gazes. In the end, the idiot boy and his idiot mother (as Byron put it) seem merely stock characters for Wordsworth's larger didactic drama of human goodness.

Such flaws within LB, however, only serve to elucidate the success of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." "TA" does away with the on-looking and condescending narrative voice--a voice so detached from the reality of what he views that he cannot penetrate the scene--and replaces it with a coherent narrative voice that is entirely a part of the scene. It seems worth noting, though, that even with this narrative voice the poem is given to us as "lines written a few miles above tintern abbey"--and thus, even here, the narrator is geographically dislocated from the scene. Be that as it may, the poem offers a coherent holisitic image of the sacred profundity of Nature that both Coleridge and Wordsworth long to convey in their poetry. (As when, in "Lime Tree Bower," Coleridge writes, "So my friend, struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood, silend with swimming sense...gaze till all doth seem less gross than bodily, and of such hues as veil the Holy Spirit.") And, in the "language of men" as Wordsworth so calls it, he offers us a view of the moral implications of both Nature and his poetry. Its brilliance serves only to further point to the absurdity of such poems as "The Idiot Boy."

Thus, the narrator in "TA" allows us to follow the complicated flow of emotion that Wordworth seems wanting to illuminate in the other poems without ever doing so. Much like Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," we are given direct insight into the narrator. When he says of his memories of "TA":"But oft,in lonely rooms, and mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet" (26-8), we as readers finally have enough connection with emotion to identify with the narrator. And while the narrator may have our will, pulling us to the destination in which we will be like Dorothy Wordsworth and "with what healing thoughts of tender joy thou remember me and these my exhortations" (145-7), he treats us as equals and worthy of comprehending his vision. And while this vision in which "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her"(123), and in which memories of nature "may have had unrememberedacts of kindness and love" (33-6) may seem idealistic and bordering on didactic, WW's salvation is in that he offers the reader the opportunity to see for herself and make her judgments accordingly. WW reminds us that what we see is only partly in the scene, and the rest lies within what our senses bring to it--"all the mighty world of eye and ear (both what they half-create and what perceive)" (106-7). Thus, as readers, our acceptance or rejection of WW's vision is largely a reader-response, and integration of WW's vision with our own. WW's acceptance of that dilutes much of the didacticism from which "We are Seven" and "Idiot Boy" suffer.

Michelle Coghlan