The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
SMP #19: The Thorn by William Wordsworth
In this balladic poem, Wordsworth tells the tale of a "solitary thorn," or British Hawthorn Bush, that "marks the spot where a pregnant woman, driven from town and forced to give birth alone on the heath, died from famine, pain and cold and anguish."
In typical Wordsworthian fashion, however, he was not at all interested in the tale of the woman. he was interested in how a tale like that, a stormy night and a solitary thorn can have a deep impact on the mind and soul of a certain type of man.
For Hawthorn, his main purpose for many of his poems was "to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitment. But, speaking in language somewhat more appropriate, it is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agited by the great and simple affections of our nature."
Before listening to this poem it is important to note the narrator. In this case, it is NOT WIlliam Wordsworth. Instead, Wordsworth is projecting the character of a specific type of superstitious mind.
In this poem the narrator is:
A sufficiently common man
A captain of a small trading vessel
Past the middle age of his life
retired on an annuity to a small village or country town
He is not a native of the town he has retired to
Men such as this having little to do, become credulous and talkative from indolence. They are prone to superstition. This character is best able to exhibit, for Wordsworth "some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind."
This will be our journey for this episode. How does superstition act upon the mind? What effect does it have? What turns of passion do men and women operating under superstition make?