User:Yazzymine688/Michael (poem)

Lead
"Michael" is a pastoral poem, written by William Wordsworth in 1800 and first published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, a series of poems that were said to have begun the English Romantic movement in literature. The poem is one of Wordsworth's best-known poems and the subject of much critical literature. It tells the story of an ageing shepherd, Michael, his wife, and his only child Luke. It deals with the consequences of the enclosures in England in the 18th Century, and their making of a working-class of men, women, and children for the factory system at the cost of intimate rural life.

The epigraph of George Eliot's Silas Marner is taken from the poem.

Article body
Summary

The poem begins with Michael's old age and love of his land. He has a wife that's twenty years his junior and his pride is his son Luke. Michael is a shepherd and is eighty, still working his land that his family held for centuries. Nevertheless, Michael lost half his land when he used it as a surety for a nephew who had met with financial misfortune.[1] When Luke reaches the age of 18, Michael sends Luke to stay in London with a merchant that he might learn a trade and acquire sufficient wealth to regain the land that Michael has lost. It breaks Michael's heart to send Luke away and he makes Luke lay the first stone of a sheepfold as a covenant between them that Luke will return. However, Luke is corrupted in the city and is forced to flee the country and Michael must live out his life without his son. He returns sometimes to the sheepfold but no longer has the heart to complete it.

Background

Wordsworth's decision to write "Michael" was influenced by the social turmoil he believed was being exhibited in England at the time. According to Page, Wordsworth was attempting to turn the attention of readers towards the increasing urbanization of England and its impact on pastoral life. The industrialization of England was profound, as it came against the English policy of enclosures-- which ultimately all led to the suffering of rural workers. Enclosures meant the agrarian workers lost access to pastoral land that they'd had access to for hundreds of years, thereby depriving many of their livelihoods. Michael, his wife Isabel, and his son Luke are thereby seen as victims of this movement, according to University of Toronto professor Richard Lessa.

Structure

"Michael" is primarily written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Therefore, Michael is unique from most pastorals, because it diverts from traditional rhyme schemes that were common within the genre.

x  /     x          /       x    /  x     /     x          / Amid the heart of many thousand mists, x       /       x     /       x         /        x       /     x          / That came to him, and left him, on the heights. x        /     x        /      x         /      x          /       x          / So lived he till his eightieth year was past.