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Wordsworth romanticism12/23/2023 ![]() Iambic metre is especially good for conveying ordinary speech, and so it is particularly useful for this poem, which – like another lyrical ballad, Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’ – involves the poet conversing with someone else. ![]() Iambic metre involves a light stress followed by a heavy stress, i.e. The ballad metre is seen in that first stanza quoted above, and throughout the poem: Wordsworth rhymes his quatrains abab whereas traditional ballads tend to be rhymed abcb, but we get the alternate rhymes and the use of iambic tetrameter (in the first three lines of the stanza) and trimeter (in the final line of each stanza) which we also find in earlier ballads. The poem also recalls the ballad in that its final stanza recalls the first: So it’s especially suitable for this poem, which pits Matthew’s defence of bookish learning against Wordsworth’s more intuitive, experiential approach to the world of nature. Although its metre (of which more below) is slightly different from traditional ballad metre, the quatrain form and use of iambic metre recall the ballad: a democratic song designed to be sung and danced to, and the commonest form of poetry among rustic folk who couldn’t read books. ![]() ‘Expostulation and Reply’ recalls the ballad form that we find in many of the poems contained in Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth concludes his ‘reply’ to Matthew’s ‘expostulation’ (in other words, his protest or argument) by telling Matthew not to ask him why he’s sitting alone on his stone and ‘dreaming’ his time away: he was ‘conversing’ with nature even before Matthew came along and engaged him in conversation. Wordsworth questions the idea that we must always be actively seeking knowledge: it continually comes to us, thanks to ‘this mighty sum’ of nature which is always ‘speaking’ to us, as powerfully as do those philosophers in books which Matthew touts as the sole route to wisdom. There are ‘Powers’ within nature which Wordsworth does not consider or ‘deem’ lesser than bookish learning. View content coverage periods and institutional full-run subscription rates for The Wordsworth Circle.Wordsworth argues that by sitting on his rock alone, in his state of ‘wise passiveness’, he is better able to ‘feed’ his mind with useful inspiration. TWC is published with the generous support of the University of Connecticut’s Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Subscriptions are concurrent with membership in the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, an allied organization of the Modern Language Association. It is concerned with anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses, or contributes to an understanding of the writers, works, and events associated with Romantic studies and its after-lives. TWC publishes original essays, conference papers, letters, editions, bibliographies, textual and historical scholarship, biography, interpretive criticism, and critical theory, as well as interdisciplinary, cultural, and comparative studies. The Wordsworth Circle ( TWC) is an international quarterly learned journal founded in 1970 to facilitate communications among colleagues interested in the lives, works, and times of British, American, and European writers from 1770 to 1850, before and after.
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