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Old Man Travelling – Wikisource, the free online library
Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, a Sketch (1798) by William Wordsworth · Sister Projects. sister projects: Wikata item.
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Date Published: 12/2/2021
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Old Man Travelling Analysis – Literary devices and Poetic …
Poem analysis of William Wordsworth’s Old Man Travelling through the review of literary techniques, poem structure, themes, and the proper usage of quotes.
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Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquility and Decay, A Sketch
“Old Man Travelling” is one of the shortest poems contained in Lyrical Ballads, containing only twenty lines; it is also one of the poems that makes use of …
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William Wordsworth – Old Man travelling | Genius
Old Man travelling Lyrics. The little hedge-row birds, That peck along the road, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step,
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Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling” (1802); Pope’s An Essay …
The speaker has apparently just stumbled across an “Old Man Travelling” and expresses strange wonder at his form, physique, and disposition. In …
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Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch – Wikipedia
“Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch”, also known as “Old Man travelling” is a poem written by William Wordsworth. It was published in 1798 in the first …
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This Old Man, That Old Man: Wordsworth Revises Wordsworth
Old Man Travelling; ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY AND DECAY, A SKETCH ______. The little hedge-row birds, That peck along the road, regard him not.
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William Wordsworth, “Old Man Travelling” from “Lyrical … – Mural
The poem that I chose to analyse (Old Man Travelling) from William Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads”, seems on the surface to be about an old man who is travelling …
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Old Man Travelling
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought—He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
—I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
“Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital.”
Old Man Travelling Analysis
Old Man Travelling
By William Wordsworth
He little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought—He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
—I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
“Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in a hospital.”
Summary of Old Man Travelling
Popularity of “Old Man Travelling”: “Old Man Travelling” by William Wordsworth, a forever green English writer and poet, is a descriptive poetic piece. It was first published in 1979 in his first Volume of Lyrical Ballad. The poem unfolds the story of an old traveler who intends to get last leaves for his injured son. It also sheds light on the unbound and infinite love of parents for their children. However, the poem’s popularity lies in the fact that it deals with the phenomenon of love and care from a different angle.
“Old Man Travelling” by William Wordsworth, a forever green English writer and poet, is a descriptive poetic piece. It was first published in 1979 in his first Volume of Lyrical Ballad. The poem unfolds the story of an old traveler who intends to get last leaves for his injured son. It also sheds light on the unbound and infinite love of parents for their children. However, the poem’s popularity lies in the fact that it deals with the phenomenon of love and care from a different angle. “Old Man Travelling” As a Representative of Love: The poem accounts for the struggling journey of an older man. It begins as the speaker contemplates the pinching serenity of the old man, who seems moving with composure alongside the road. His bending figure hints at the pain he is enduring while undertaking this thoughtful journey. The speaker wonders why the old man is taking pains of this challenging journey. Astonished by the old traveler’s struggle, the speaker dares to inquire about the reason for his traveling. To console the speaker, the old man replies with significant words that he is going take the last leave of his injured son. His son has returned severely injured from a sea-fight and dying in the hospital. Therefore, following the protocol of the navy, the father is heading to ask for his son’s leave.
The poem accounts for the struggling journey of an older man. It begins as the speaker contemplates the pinching serenity of the old man, who seems moving with composure alongside the road. His bending figure hints at the pain he is enduring while undertaking this thoughtful journey. The speaker wonders why the old man is taking pains of this challenging journey. Astonished by the old traveler’s struggle, the speaker dares to inquire about the reason for his traveling. To console the speaker, the old man replies with significant words that he is going take the last leave of his injured son. His son has returned severely injured from a sea-fight and dying in the hospital. Therefore, following the protocol of the navy, the father is heading to ask for his son’s leave. Major Themes in “Old Man Travelling”: The bitter realities of life, parent’s love, and death are the major themes of the poem. This short yet inspiring poem unfolds the struggle of a weakened old father traveling on his own to take leave for his son. At a deeper level, the poem elucidates the loneliness which human beings suffer in life. The man’s worrying condition and expressions indicate that he is not moving with pain but is lost in his own thoughts. The traveler is quiet, digesting the fact that his son is counting his last moments. Through this short poem, the writer explains no matter how long we stay in this world, our inevitable fate is death. Perhaps the traveler’s understanding of the cyclical nature has made it easy for him to accept the dying condition of his son.
Analysis of Literary Devices Used in “Old Man Travelling”
literary devices are used to bring qualify the writer’s ideas impressively and appealingly. Their appropriate usage adds a layer of meaning to the simple poetic pieces. Wordsworth has also employed some literary devices in this poem whose analysis is as follows.
Allusion: Allusion is a belief and an indirect reference of a person, place, thing, or idea of a historical, cultural, political, or literary significance. Wordsworth has alluded to a city such as;
“Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in a hospital.”
Alliteration: The poem shows the use of alliteration, a technique in which initial sounds of neighboring words are consonants such as “many miles” where the initial sound is the same that is /m/. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line such as the sound of /e/ in “Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth” and the sound of /o/ in “The object of his journey; he replied.” Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such as the sound of /h/ in “He hath no need. He is by nature led” and the sound of /n/ in “And there is dying in a hospital.” Dialogue: The poem shows the use of dialogue such as “Sir! I am going many miles to take / A last leave of my son, a mariner” shows the reply of the old man. Enjambment: It is defined as a thought in verse that does not come to an end at a line break; rather, it rolls over to the next line. For example;
“He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.”
Imagery: Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. William Wordsworth has used imagery in this poem such as “His look and bending figure, all bespeak”, “With envy, what the old man hardly feels” and “Sir! I am going many miles to take.” Irony: Irony is a figure of speech in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words. The writer has used situational irony throughout the poem to show the positive attitude of the old traveler. Despite knowing the critical situation of his son, he seems calm and content. Metaphor: It is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between the objects that are different. The poet has used an extended metaphor of death to show every living being is destined to taste death. Symbolism: Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings that are different from literal meanings. “Bending figure” symbolize the age of the old traveler.
Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in “Old Man Travelling”
Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.
Free Verse: Free verse is a type of poetry that does not contain patterns of rhyme or meter. This is a free-verse poem with no strict rhyme or meter. Stanza: A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. The poem contains twenty lines with no stanza break in it.
Quotes to be Used
These lines from “Old Man Travelling” are suitable to quote while talking about the aging phenomenon.
Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquility and Decay, A Sketch
Introduction
By Kandice Sharren
Reception
Although one of the shortest poems in Lyrical Ballads, “Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch” did merit a mention in Charles Burney’s review for the Monthly Review:
The Old Man travelling, a Sketch, finely drawn: but the termination seems pointed against the war; from which, however, we are now no more able to separate ourselves, than Hercules was to free himself from the shirt of Nessus. The old traveller’s son might have died by disease. (qtd. in Gamer and Porter 160–61)
Here, Burney’s general anxiety that the experimental nature of Lyrical Ballads is “degrading to poetry” (qtd. in Gamer and Porter 156) turns into a specific political worry that this poem is launching a critique of militarism. However, in arguing that “[t]he old traveller’s son might have died by disease” and thereby avoiding implicit criticism of government and military policies, Burney glosses over the key contrast of the poem, which Geoffrey Hartman identifies when he discusses “Old Man Travelling”:
two kinds of death are juxtaposed: the being insensibly and slowly subdued to nature (‘animal tranquility and decay’) and the premature cutting-off which entry into the human world proper seems to entail. (146–47)
But the shock of the contrast between the old man whose body has been subject to the natural processes of time and his son’s untimely and violent death is not the only one that this poem offers. For Lionel Trilling, the old man’s act of speech is a shock in itself, because the poem begins with a description of the old man as “so old and so nearly inanimate that the birds regard him as little as if he were a stone or a tree,” so that when he speaks, “The revelation of the actuality of his being, of his humanness, quite dazzles us” (58).
Of course, in Wordsworth’s subsequent revisions of the poem, he first folded the old man’s reply into the speaker’s voice before erasing it entirely. Nevertheless, Don H. Bialostosky claims that the old man’s act of speech has been prioritized, an effect of the scholars observing “an incongruity between the sketch, which assimilates the old man to the silence and impassiveness of nature, and his speech, which reveals him not only as capable of speech but as affected by an unanticipated human woe” (125) which has resulted in ignoring the dramatic qualities of the speaker’s voice in favour of the old man’s response to the speaker’s question. Bialostosky seeks to integrate the two voices, re-emphasizing the speaker’s voice as dramatic and worth interrogating as much as the old man’s reply. In one of the only full readings of the poem, he argues that the poem has been structured so that the reader undergoes the same revelation as the speaker, from envy of the old man’s “nearness to the end” to a sense of being “chastened for his self-pity over his own imagined strivings and sufferings by the fate of the old man’s son and by the dignity with which the old man goes to face that fate and tells of his journey thither” (128). By placing the reader in the same position as the speaker (in part through the use of present tense), the speaker of the poem guides his reader through the same lesson (Bialostosky 129).
Interpretation
Although “Old Man Travelling” is not one of the “lyrical ballads” announced by the volume’s title, it shares the concerns of the ballads more closely than the other examples of blank verse in the collection. Like many of the ballads, it takes as its subject an elderly and/or impoverished character, whose movement through the landscapes seems to make him a part of it, and is structured as a dialogue between an elusive speaker and its subject.
However, while poems like “The Mad Mother” and “The Thorn” represent the suffering that women experience as a result of masculine warfare and the negligence of men, “Old Man Travelling” instead represents the suffering that fathers experience. However, unlike the poems that represent bereaved mothers at great length and in vivid detail, “Old Man Travelling” is more restrained in its grief, and the speaker ceases to describe the man’s physical appearance when he learns of the tragedy that has befallen him. Thus, where Lyrical Ballads objectifies grieving women, describing the ways in which they are physically overwhelmed by madness and visibly (and audibly) distressed, the silence afforded the “Old Man Travelling” following his statement allows him a more dignified grief.
Formal Elements
“Old Man Travelling” is one of the shortest poems contained in Lyrical Ballads, containing only twenty lines; it is also one of the poems that makes use of blank verse (iambic pentameter), rather than one of the versions of ballad meter. Nevertheless, the poem is thematically closer to those poems that structure themselves as ballads, in its emphasis on the impoverished peasantry and their small grievances. However, where the ballad meter moves those poems along at a quick pace, here the use of blank verse contributes to a slower and more contemplative tone that matches the sense of gravitas that the poem lends to the old man.
Material Elements
This poem can be found on the pages labeled 189 and 190 of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with the title and first twelve lines on page 189 and the final eight lines on page 190. These pages make up the seventh leaf in the M-gathering. However, in accounting for the pages taken up by “Old Man Travelling” it is worth noting that the pagination has been affected by the replacement of “Lewti” with “The Nightingale,” which resulted in two extra pages added before page 70.
The title is centred and broken into three lines, separating the main title, “Old Man Travelling,” from the first subtitle, “Animal Tranquillity and Decay,” and the second subtitle, “A Sketch.” All three lines are in block letters, with the first larger than the other two, and “Animal Tranquillity and Decay” in the smallest font—which is somewhat ironic, considering that this would later become the poem’s main title.
Page Images and Diplomatic Transcription
189 OLD MAN TRAVELLING; ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY AND DECAY, A SKETCH. ======= The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought—He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet : he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led 190 To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
—I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey ; he replied
“ Sir ! I am going many miles to take
“ A last leave of my son, a mariner,
“ Who from a sea-fight has been brought to
Falmouth,
“ And there is dying in an hospital.”
William Wordsworth – Old Man travelling
“Sir! I am going many miles to take
“A last leave of my son, a mariner,
“Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital.”
The little hedge-row birds,That peck along the road, regard him not.He travels on, and in his face, his step,His gait, is one expression; every limb,His look and bending figure, all bespeakA man who does not move with pain, but movesWith thought—He is insensibly subduedTo settled quiet: he is one by whomAll effort seems forgotten, one to whomLong patience has such mild composure given,That patience now doth seem a thing, of whichHe hath no need. He is by nature ledTo peace so perfect, that the young beholdWith envy, what the old man hardly feels.—I asked him whither he was bound, and whatThe object of his journey; he replied
Reading Aloud (#19, #20, and #21): Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling” (1802); Pope’s An Essay on Man (1734); Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816)
My “Topics in Romanticism” course met last Thursday evening for the first time this semester. Since we convene only once a week, I decided we should use the first class to introduce ourselves to the term “romanticism” and to the topics we will be investigating over the next several weeks.
After going over the syllabus and the required texts, I shared an excerpt from The Oxford Companion to English Literature‘s entry “Romanticism”:
In the most abstract terms, Romanticism may be regarded as the triumph of the values of imaginative spontaneity, visionary originality, wonder, and emotional self-expression over the classical standards of balance, order, restraint, proportion, and objectivity. Its name derives from romance, the literary form in which desires and dreams prevail over everyday realities. (7th edition)
To get a taste of these qualities, we read William Wordsworth’s, “Old Man Travelling” (1802).
Old Man Travelling
Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought—He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
—I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
‘Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital.’ (Major Works [OUP], pg. 29)
Students were quick to pick up on the qualities indicated in the OCEL; indeed, the subject matter is presented as spontaneous, unexpected, accidental. The speaker has apparently just stumbled across an “Old Man Travelling” and expresses strange wonder at his form, physique, and disposition. In these lines, the old man becomes a vision of something just out of reach, a patience, peace, or tranquility so extreme that it is “animal,” nonhuman. We have all the key features illustrated above: “imaginative spontaneity, visionary originality, wonder, and emotional self-expression.”
And yet, as I then pointed out, we also see two additional features that are not mentioned in this excerpt (though they are touched on elsewhere in the OCEL entry on romanticism): namely, a profound humanitarianism and an emphasis on nature. Regarding the latter, it is noteworthy that the speaker first notices the old man by noticing that “[t]he little hedge-row birds” do not notice him. Moreover, he sees the old man as an animal, a creature that easily belongs to—fits in with—the natural environment around him. We see evidence of the former in the revelation that closes the poem. The speaker shares his vision for sixteen lines, only to have his vision undercut by the material and familial hardship of the old man. He is not merely the ideal image of a patient creature; he is a father travelling with all the painful speed he can muster to bid farewell to a fatally-wounded son. Wordsworth expertly leaves us without poetic commentary, and by doing so seems to interfuse the speaker (and the reader) with the old man. A nonverbal but sympathetic relation is established. After the aesthetic boldness of the earlier lines, we are left with no more words. “Shit… I’m just so sorry,” is all I can muster.
Over the next several minutes, I contextualized this humanitarianism. Leaning heavily on Aidan Day’s Romanticism (1995, 1st edition), I suggested that “humanitarian sympathy” was actually quite fashionable in the decades leading up to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) and, as such, “was part of the ground-swell of radical political feeling in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the period that saw first the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution” (Day 12). Whether this “radical political feeling” opposed state tyranny or the evils of slavery, championed the rights of women or the poor, it serves as the historical backdrop to a poem like “Old Man Travelling” and evinces a widespread desire to break free of chains: physical, mental, and symbolic.
At this point we transitioned to two poems I had asked students to read beforehand. Though many had not even known they were supposed to read the poems, I passed out copies of the first epistle to Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733) as well as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816). Might the differences between Pope and Shelley relate to this radical political feeling? To a desire to bring about social revolution and change?
An Essay on Man (Epistle I, Section X)
Cease then, nor ORDER Imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: This kind, this due degre
Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee.
Submit — In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow’r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, “Whatever is, is RIGHT.”
Though we certainly talked about more than this section of Pope’s first epistle, this last section serves as a good illustration of the ideas and values that romantic poetry and the radical politics that preceded it turned against. Indeed, this stanza embodies—in both form and content—the values indicated in the OCEL excerpt above: “balance, order, restraint, proportion, and objectivity.” Instead of breaking chains or aspiring to be or to know more than one might think possible, Pope attempts to prove the famous eighteenth-century notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Though we might not be able to see or sense its perfection or its rightness, “Whatever is [must be] RIGHT.” This is not just a claim about humankind’s place in “the great chain.” It is also a claim about the natural world itself. It is hierarchical, ordered, eternal, and unchanging. Pope doubles this sentiment in the very metrical and sonic balance of his masterful couplets.
And what image of humankind and nature appears in romantic poetry? We’ve already seen a bit of it in the Wordsworth poem. But what about something a bit more challenging?
Mont Blanc (Section 5)
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: — the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them: — Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Students were rightly intimidated by Shelley. While Pope’s language might require a bit of work for the 21st-century reader, his figures of speech and his arguments are not very complicated (at least on a first read). They are easy to summarize. Indeed, he wants them to be concise and clear.
But what ideas are at work in this closing stanza of “Mont Blanc”? As soon as we ask this question upon reading these lines for the first time, we confront a difficulty not only of two-hundred-year-old English but of ambiguous figures of speech and a more robust, less restrained and far less proportionate view of the human mind and its relation to nature. What is “the power” to which the opening line refers? What is “[t]he secret Strength of things”? Is it out there? Or is it within “the human mind’s imaginings”? What is nature, its power, or its activity, without the mind’s capacity to do something with “[s]ilence and solitude”? In the coming semester, we’ll investigate such questions and how they might relate to and have implications for the issues of morality and justice, of radical sympathy and brutal murder, and of the crucial tension between beauty and sublimity.
Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch
“Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch”, also known as “Old Man travelling” is a poem written by William Wordsworth. It was published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads – a collection of poems created in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem is estimated to have been composed either in late 1796 or early 1797.[1] “Old Man Travelling” used to be a part of another poem by William Wordsworth, called “The Old Cumberland Beggar”, devised as a description of the eponymous beggar; however, “Old Man Travelling” was completed earlier and made into a separate piece.[1][2] The poem has been referred to as “a short sequel” to “The Old Cumberland Beggar”, and Wordsworth himself regarded it as “an overflowing” of it.[3][4] The form of the poem has been described as “a sonnet-like poem in two acts”.[5] It consists of one stanza written in blank verse.[6]
The poem describes an old man and the journey he is on. It also touches upon the relationship the man has with the nature surrounding him and – except for the final version of the poem published in 1815 – it relates his encounter with the speaker. The narrator asks the old man a question about the objective of his journey, to which the man replies that he is on his way to see his dying son.
Title and Content Changes [ edit ]
The poem was first released in 1798 under the title “Old Man Travelling” with the subtitle “Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch”.[7] In the next edition of Lyrical Ballads, which came out in 1800, the subtitle became the official title.[8] In the same edition Wordsworth also decided to refrain from using the name “Old Man Travelling”. According to Wolfson, he might have done it so as to avoid emphasizing the ironic undertone of the poem – the contrast between the lyrical sketch and the violent imagery of war – as well as to “stabilise a harmony of pathos”.[9]
The first changes in the text occurred in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. In this version, the old man’s speech transformed from “direct speech into reported speech”.[10] Ulin comments that Wordsworth introduced the revision in order to make the old man seem less independent as a character, as well as to reduce the social distance between him and the speaker, marked in the 1798 version by the man addressing the speaker as “Sir”.[10] In the 1815 version, only the first 14 lines of the poem were published, the last 6 lines of the original being skipped there.[8]
Historical and Political Context [ edit ]
The poem contains certain political allusions. According to Bugg, the reader’s understanding of Wordsworth’s commentary on the state of politics provided in spite of the “repressive climate” is what makes the poem so impactful.[11] The location of the old man’s son’s arrival is intentional – by mentioning Falmouth, a military port, Wordsworth alludes to the war that Great Britain waged against the French revolutionaries in the 1790s.[12][11] Benis argues that the poem is “directly critical of official authority”.[13] The exchange between the old man and the gentleman – presented in the form of direct speech in the 1798 version – illustrates a clash of viewpoints; the old man represents a person affected by the conflict between England and France, and the speaker – someone who benefits from it.[12] By giving the old man a chance to speak for himself, Wordsworth confronts the reader with the drastic reality and “harsh dailiness of war”.[14] Considering the political situation of Britain at the time, discourse condemning the government’s doings seemed “unpatriotic, even seditious”.[13]According to Lucas, the changes the author introduced within the poem illustrate Wordsworth’s final disconnection from his former radical beliefs and support for the French Revolution, and eventual subscription to the conservative, Tory views.[15]
Analyses and Interpretations [ edit ]
Relationship between the Two Parts of the Poem [ edit ]
The original version of the poem consists of twenty lines, and splits into two parts divided by a dash – the first fourteen lines are descriptive, while the other six report an exchange between the speaker and the old man.[16] The first part – referred to as “the sketch” – is written in present tense in its entirety.[8]
Due to the fact that the two parts are so vastly different, the essence of the poem has been located in “one of the parts, rather than in the relation between them” by some scholars.[16] Some of them believe that the character’s speech is “incongruous” in comparison to the descriptive part.[16] Notwithstanding the jump from the more poetic, lyrical mode into the narrative one, which is more ingrained in the “social and geopolitical reality” , the latter has been said to give an impression of being just as “stagy and generic” as the former.[17] The fact that Wordsworth decided to omit the final six lines in the 1815 version of the poem has made some critics believe that they are right in their judgement of its inessentiality.[16] Langbaum is of the opinion that removing the final dialogue was a good choice on Wordsworth’s part, as the recount of where the man is heading and why is “uninteresting”.[18] Bialostosky, however, argues that the two parts can be united by examining the narrator’s motives.[16] Instead of being told the story, the reader gets to experience the contrast between the peaceful beginning and the disheartening ending of the poem in the same way the narrator did, and the “manipulation” of “the reader’s poetic expectations” is used for the sake of the inclusion of the reader in the experience.[19]
The Old Man and The Speaker [ edit ]
The man himself is not given a voice in the first part of the poem. Ulin suggests that the focus is not on the old man as a person, but rather as the speaker’s idea of him. His lack of individuality only adds to the fact that the man is meant to serve as a representative of “a type” of person.[20]
In the latter part the old man answers the question asked by the speaker – who, according to Owen, should be identified with Wordsworth.[21] Bialostosky finds the interaction strange – taking into account the narrator’s presuppositions about the man, he “seems already to have answered his own question”.[8] The image of the old man that his interlocutor “created with envy” is far from reality;[22] however, it is a part of a juxtaposition that Wordsworth may have wanted to achieve.[15] The old man’s words change the atmosphere of the poem – “reflective melancholy” disappears, and the speaker gets a chance to interact with a character that no longer resembles “a type”.[15] Given the chance to speak, the old man gains his individuality. He refers to the speaker as “Sir”, which, as Lucas points out, makes the speaker a “type” of a character, instead; it identifies him as someone of a higher status who was in favour of the war against Napoleon.[15]
The Old Man and the Nature [ edit ]
Scholars take interest in the two opening lines – “The little hedge-row birds/ That peck along the road, regard him not”[23] – especially in regard to the birds’ reaction to the old man, or the absence of it. This introduction purposefully puts the focus on the birds, not the man himself.[24] Owen proposes two interpretations regarding the lack of reaction of either party: he sees it at serving either to emphasize the lack of connection between them, or on the contrary, the unity that allows them to coexist.[25] In the latter interpretation, the birds are not alarmed and do not get startled when the old man passes near them, because they do not see him as a threat, similarly to how they would not pay attention to other animals that could not harm them.[25]
Water is a significant element in Lyrical Ballads, and in the case of the “Old Man Travelling”, the mention of the military port in Falmouth – and a hospital for returning soldiers, in which the son of the old man is located – represents “the exigencies of war”.[26]
Travelling [ edit ]
The old man is referred to as an epitome of “the positively idle, solitary traveller”.[27] The lines “A man who does not move with pain, but moves/ With thought”[28] point to the fact that the way the man is travelling is “an intellectual pleasure”, which comes only with experience and is a right which is not a given, but rather has to be gained.[29] It is not just the thoughts that guide him, but also the nature (“by nature led”),[30] which only adds emphasis to the fact that the man finds the power within him subconsciously.[29] Travelling in itself has “existential significance” in Wordsworth’s writing – and Romanticism in general – as it could shed light on the self within and lead up to “personal revelation and renovation”.[31]
Lines nine and ten – “Long patience … / That patience now …” compare two kinds of patience; the first one depends on the passage of time and can be gained as one gets older, and the latter – patience for the current situation – is redundant for the old man, because he has already acquired the former one.[32] In the same manner, old man’s travelling “with thought” represents “thoughtful idleness”, as opposed to the kind of travelling without this kind of enhancement. Because of the advantages he had gained over the years, the old man can also elude certain obstacles, such as pain or the need for endurance, which is something inexperienced people cannot do – “the young behold / With envy …”.[33][34]
Opinions of the critics on whether the poem follows similar agendas to those followed by “The Old Cumberland Beggar” are divided. Chandler believes that these two poems differ in that aspect, and that “Old Man Travelling” is free from ideologies adopted by the other poem;[2] Benis, however, says that “Old Man Travelling” addresses the problematic status of vagrants.[35] Not only the objective of the old man’s travel, but also the “long, unsupervised” journey in itself is a reference to politics, namely criticism regarding the power of authority.[13] The old man acts according to his own will rather than following the governmental guidelines, which could make him subject to punishment for vagrancy, but since he is travelling to say goodbye to his dying son, who is a veteran – his status as a vagrant-traveller is ambiguous and he is likely to be excused.[34]
According to the critics, the “sketch” does not only relate the man’s journey on a physical level, but also “assimilate[s] the old man to the silence and impassiveness of nature”.[8] The old man, who is “… one by whom / All effort seem forgotten”,[36] is perceived as a person who, having achieved everything there is to achieve, has already reached the destination of his journey as a human, letting the natural world take the lead, and this poise is what the young narrator seems to envy.[8][37]
This Old Man, That Old Man: Wordsworth Revises Wordsworth
1) This Old Man (1798)
When Wordsworth published this poem in the ground-breaking first volume of Lyrical Ballads1 (1798) it had a long title and told a story.
Old Man Travelling;
ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY AND DECAY,
A SKETCH
________ The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought – He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
– I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
“Sir! I am going many miles to take
“A last leave of my son, a mariner,
“Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
“And there is dying in an hospital.”
Wordsworth’s persona contemplates the disturbing serenity of this traveller, who moves with mild composure, but aged difficulty along the edges of a road in Somerset, where Wordsworth was renting a house at the time. The first part of the poem is a curious confrontation between the old man’s determination and the (presumably) young observer’s sense that in his stately, effortless, un-patient (as opposed to impatient) progress he is watching one of the driving forces of the universe, the ‘peace’ which unfolds at the limits of endurance, and makes the end of life so much quieter than life’s hot-headed, eventful beginning, soon to be chronicled in the 1799 Prelude.
But the poem also solidly recognises that this is a tragedy in real time. That word ‘hardly’ in l. 14 may mean the young man doesn’t think the old man ‘feels’ very much; but it also hints he may be taking things ‘hard’. If the old man’s son has been injured in a sea-fight, that means he has been giving his all for his country in the early phases of the Revolutionary War. Did he help to win at the Glorious First of June, 1794? or at some other succesful skirmish, for the Royal Navy was invariably successful at this time? Is this then the response of a grateful nation—expecting a man of pensionable age to walk a good hundred miles, or more, from the Quantocks to Cornwall, with no clear prospect of finding his boy alive when he gets there? The Navy was not an enviable career at this time. Shipboard conditions, especially in battle, were appalling. The Navy consisted of few volunteeers and innumerable pressed men in wartime, and resentment broke out in major mutinies at Spithead and The Nore the year before this poem was written. Wordsworth may no longer have espoused William Godwin’s ideals of philosophic anarchism, as he had during the French Revolution. He wrote now more as patriot than radical. But the poem in 1798 includes an element of government critique and political protest, and the reviewers were quick to pick this up. Charles Burney, Frances Burney’s father, thought ‘the termination seems pointed against the war.’
Whether the son is dying of injury or disease, or disease induced by injury (and all three could be terrible prospects with primitive painkillers, e.g. rum), Wordsworth progressively reduced his part in quick-following revisions in 1800 and 1802. First he is folded into the old man’s indirect speech, then Wordsworth deliberately signifies that his condition may not be critical, not ‘dying’ now, just ‘lying.’ But the most drastic changes were yet to come:
2) That Old Man (1815)
Animal Tranquillity and Decay,
A Sketch
________ The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought – He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given, 10
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
In 1815 Wordsworth pared the poem down to its metaphysical roots. Now the old man has no speaking–part, nor does it seem to matter, any longer, whether he is capable of speaking. The fact is the birds make as much noise, pecking along the road, as does his trudging. The poem slides into eerie silence as if muted. The speaker closes in not on the old man’s voice but on the spectacle of his suffering, into which he seems ominously to disappear. He is becoming a revelation of it, perhaps, sliding out of pain and into infinity, as Wordsworth had suggested in some lines originally written for his play, The Borderers (written 1795-6) but shifted to a later poem, The White Doe of Rylstone (written 1808) in 1837:
Action is transitory — a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle— this way or that—
‘Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed: Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.
Action belongs to time, suffering goes on and on, and feeds into eternity (Wordsworth, once again, can’t make up his mind whether the verb in the last line should be ‘shares’ or ‘has’). The ‘settled quiet’ of the old man is a preparation for his soon-to-be-altered state. No more ‘this way or that’, but a steady melding with what Orwell called that terrible thing, a natural death, ‘something slow, smelly and painful.’ This is writing about the ‘human condition’ all right. But one reason I’ve never liked that phrase is if we’re not careful it keeps individuals at a distance. Is that what Wordsworth is doing here, becoming a spectator ab extra, feeling for, but never with, his characters, as Coleridge put it in Table-Talk? Is his conspicuous concern bothering the ‘aged, aged man’, as in Lewis Carroll’s parody of Lyrical Ballads, ‘The White Knight’s Song’? Or, since no-one can die in the first person in literature, is Wordsworth giving us the next best thing: faltering steps down the long tunnel to the bright light (or whatever metaphor you prefer) where you no longer hear the birds singing or even pecking. You can’t see ‘extinction’s alp’ as Larkin puts it in his poem on terminal care, ‘The Old Fools’, when every effort goes into watching your frail steps up the ‘rising ground’ of its slopes.He was to deal with the strangely automatic serenity, what Christopher Ricks has called the thing-like humanity of extreme old age, in another great poem, ‘The Leech Gatherer’.
It should also be noted that by 1815 Wordsworth’s politics have moved decisively to the right, and the Tory government at this time (Corn Laws, suspension of Habeas Corpus, Peterloo) did not like to be reminded of particular abuses, such as under-funding of the Navy twenty years ago.
So should we prefer ‘Animal Tranquillity and Decay’, a poem suggesting we are programmed, in the end, to go gentle into that good night; or should it be ‘Old Man Travelling’, where the subject of the poem is viewed in close-up as well a long-shot, and expending his last steps, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, in final heroic purpose? I’ve asked students to decide, after close study of these poems, and the result of their aggregated vote is intriguingly close. Some think case-studies add awkward footnotes to poetry, and are better marginalised in this instance; others that Wordsworth, as in 1815 the poem makes its bee-line for the borderlands of Beckett’s seventh age of man, cruelly drowns that admonishing sound-track he speaks of in ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘the still, sad music of humanity.’
But you don’t have to decide. Wordsworth, who liked to ensure that we have both readings if engagement between them was fruitful, has ensured we can read both poems. And so, more courageously, has Christopher Ricks As Wordsworth can’t choose between versions of this poem, neither does he, in editing the most recent Oxford Book of English Verse (1999). On pp. 341-42 he prints both 1798 and 1815 texts.
Works Cited
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (London: Robinson, 1793).
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Keith Weiner (Routledge, 1990), II, 200.
George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Volume 4 ‘In Front of Your Nose’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 226-27
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 8.
Philip Larkin, ‘The Old Fools’ in High Windows (1974) [Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. and introd. Anthony Thwaite, (London: Faber, 1989,) pp. 196-97]
Christopher Ricks,The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
——- ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse, (Oxford: OUP, 1999).
READING MODULE
READING MODULE
William Wordsworth, “Old Man Travelling” from “Lyrical Ballads, 1978.
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought — He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
— I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
“Sir! I am going many miles to take
“A last leave of my son, a mariner,
“Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
“And there is dying in an hospital.”
The poem that I chose to analyse (Old Man Travelling) from William Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads”, seems on the surface to be about an old man who is travelling on his own to take leave of his son. However, at a deeper level Wordsworth is highlighting the loneliness which men suffer in the course of our life.
First of all, as I mentioned before, one of the main ideas of the poem is that men are born alone and we remain alone during our lifetime. This idea, connected to the romantic conception of the man, being himself in contact with nature, is patently obvious in the first four verses of the poem, where the poet is using the image of “little birds” and above all, the explanation of the traveller’s expression, the way he walks and even the fact that he is not moving with pain, but absorbed in his own thoughts.
A second remarkable idea is the one that the poet expresses in the tittle: “Animal Tranquility and Decay”. This is, our condition as human beings allows us to be conscious of the fact that we decay in the same way nature does, but the diffecence is that birds and nature cannot be conscious of it (so, they are just what they are, they cannot feel) and we are conscious of our limitations as human beings. Furthermore, it is not by chance that the protagonist is exactly an old man, one ”by whom all the effort seems forgotten”. The traveller is completely quiet walking and he is completely aware of the fact that he accepts his son dying in a short period of time, in the same way he is going to die as well some day, because our condition as human beings allows us to appreciate the pleasure of being part of the wonderful nature, but also implies that our irremediable final fate is going to be our death.
The old traveller seems to assume perfectly this intrinsic human condition because he answers normally when the poet himself as a narrator asks him about the objective of his travel (in the second stanza). The traveller tells the poet that he is going to “take the last leave of his son because he is dying in a hospital”. He shows a perfect harmony with the nature sourrounding him.
In my opinion, the poem is completely straightforward in meaning, because the poet is able to reflect perfectly this real connection between traveller and nature (first stanza) and the acceptance of his son’s death without pain as a consequence on being part of this nature.
On the other hand, the structure of the poem is quite simple. It is divided into two stanzas, the first one contains twelve lines and the second one contains eight lines with free rhyme. Wordsworth is the narrator and even in the second stanza, he participates having a conversation with the protagonist.
The poem is written in a very accessible language. The poet makes use of direct speech at the end to transmit the meaning of the poem to the reader by involving him into the situation. Finally, Wordsworth uses two archaic words in two occasions: the use of “hath” ,which means “has” and “doth” , which is “does”; also the use of the old-fashioned expression “to take a last leave of my son”, which is to say goodbye to someone because he is dying. He uses the adjective “old” in the tittle. He wants to highlight the decay suffered by human being. The one which is painful for most part of people, but not for the old traveller.
As a conclusion, I would like to say that I chose this poem because it was really shocking for me the way in which Wordsworth deals with so delicate a topic as it is decay and death. I really like the meanig of the poem because all of us make up a whole, which is the nature.
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