Experimental Narrative Ballads

Abstract

In ‘The Female Vagrant’, written between 1791 and 1792, Wordsworth had found the subject matter that he wanted but he had still to find the medium in which to convey it. This he developed in a group of poems, all in some form of ballad measure and mostly written during the prolific year 1798. The language Wordsworth used for all these ballads is basically similar and marks a clear break from that which he used earlier and also, to some extent, that which he used later. It was influenced very greatly by the ballads of Percy’s Reliques and the broadsheet ballads of the time.¹ In it, Wordsworth set himself severe limitations. He deliberately worked within a very restricted language, in both vocabulary and sentence structure, abandoning everything that had hitherto been associated with poetry, except rhyme and metre. There are difficulties in coming to terms with this language. Wordsworth uses both diction and syntax in such a new and bold manner that it sometimes hovers on the borders of collapse into the ludicrous even today. Nevertheless, its success in terms of what Wordsworth was trying to do is quite astonishing. Frequently it strikes readers who come fresh to it, with inbuilt assumptions of what to expect from poetry, as clumsy and banal.