Wordsworth reigns today as one of the top Romantic Era poets. Sometimes, poetry can be confusing and difficult to read like Wordsworth’s Preface but by using the language of the peasant poets, Michael: A Pastoral Poem, becomes a very down-to-earth and endearing poem. This type of transitioning shows how talented William Wordsworth really was. There are only a few poets who I would consider to be on the literary level with him: William Shakespeare, William Blake (that’s a lot of Williams), John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These are not peasant poets, but many of the peasant poets were very good also.
John Clare, one of the peasant poets and author of Remembrances, mourns the loss of open fields and the rights of the local people to carry out their duties as farmers and shepherds. In this poem, there are a lot of ampersands which confused me at first, then I realized that perhaps a common person is not going to write everything out, they will probably use a type of shorthand. So ampersands, misspelled words (in the opinion of an educated person), and missing or different punctuation is to be expected. In this poem, Clare touches on past memories, remembering how it used to be before the wealthy people came in, bought all the land up, and fenced everything in.
Clare’s Written in a Thunder Storm July 15th 1841, is all about nature and natural things also. The peasant poets knew these things and dealt with them on a regular basis. So the poetry could be about their way of life and generally was. Wordsworth was not a working poet but he chose to write his poetry like a laborer and poet. It is an amazing fact that people would actually come out to the fields and watch the peasant poets work. Whatever your background may be, this genre of poetry can cause deep emotional feelings if you let it. The loss of the farm at the end of Michael: A Pastoral Poem shows the effect of what these poor poets lived and dealt with in their lives.
Literature Rocks 