I found another article for my final paper and it explains Wordsworth’s feeling on the pastoral genre. Wordsworth, in writing this ballad, saw the possible decline or loss of “independent domestic life” (Page, p. 626) which had connections to family and love of family and home. Wordsworth uses language, diction, syntax, and meter to support the values described in his pastoral poems and ballads. The article states that he did not adopt the archaic diction or dialect because he wanted his language to be original. Wordsworth shows proof that the English Bible uses original and universal language, “…its idiomatic strength was unimpaired by excess of technical distinctions and conventional refinements; (Page, p. 630). Wordsworth thought that the Bible was accurate and was a universally recognized standard of language. So by using language similar to the Bible in his pastoral poems and ballads, he was showing a description of a people in their true form. Toward the end of the ballad, Wordsworth brings out another Biblical device, the language of Prophecy:
Meantime Luke began/To slacken in his duty; and, at length,/He in the dissolute city gave himself/ To evil courses: ignominy and shame/ Fell to him, so that he was driven at last/ To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas. (lines 442-447). This follows two similar stories, one from the Bible; The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) and Silas Marner by George Eliot. Other language devices that Wordsworth uses in Michael are balanced, alliterative phrasing and “fairly even grammatical units” (Page, p. 632). Further along in my paper, I plan to show that William Carlos Williams uses many of the same devices that Wordsworth uses, but in some ways they seem to be different. This difference could be caused from the fact that Williams is an American poet in the Modernist times.
Literature Rocks 