ABSTRACT
During his highly productive residence at Racedown in Dorset and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, Wordsworth worked on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, a poem which Coleridge took to be one of the most beautiful in the language. Over the last twenty years this poem has come to look absolutely central to Wordsworth’s achievement and its narrative is now highly familiar to students: owing to failed harvests and high prices, Margaret’s husband enlists as a paid recruit; he does not return, Margaret and her family decline and die, nature re-encroaches upon her cottage plot until all that is left is an overgrown ruin. For the poet and the character – originally called the Pedlar, later the Wanderer – who narrates Margaret’s tragedy, the ruined cottage provides an image of consolation. Wordsworth tells of how he traced with milder interest That secret spirit of humanity Which, ’mid the calm oblivious tendencies Of nature, ’mid her plants, her weeds, and flowers, And silent over growings, still survived. 1
