Oct 16, 2015
‘Ruth’ by Wordsworth
A simple and playful ‘six stanza, tail rhyming’ metre contrasts the visceral narrative of the verse, Ruth is a romantically structured warning against romanticism. Ruth is a poem about a woman’s upbringing, her phenomenological and emotional experience falling in love, her life and her death. It’s about isolation, desire and the natural instinct. It leads me to believe Wordsworth was a cynic and a realist, however not entirely, and if I were to interpret his poem in one sentence, it would be this: Young lady please take from this adventurous, British-American man not his hand in marriage, but his courage and his stupid joy in life.
