워즈워스 시에 나타난 모성애와 공감적 상상력 「가시나무」, 「백치소년」, 「선원의 어머니」, 「미친 어머니」를 중심으로

Abstract

William Wordsworth in his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads(1800) notes that “the purpose” of his “experimental poems” is “to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature” which can be obtained “by tracing the maternal passion through many of its more subtle windings[emphasis added].” In Books II and V of The Prelude, Wordsworth himself reminisces about the traumatic experience of losing his own mother at an early age of his life. In consequence, he may have turned to ‘Nature’ as a substitute for his lost mother. This paper is an attempt to investigate the motif of maternal love and other affections involved the relationship between the mother and her baby as represented in Wordsworth’s four poems: “The Thorn,” “The Idiot boy,” “The Sailor’s Mother,” and “The Mad Mother.” The premise of this study is that however twisted, the mothers’ affections for their children (and vice versa) in the ‘extreme situations’ of these poems, illustrate the significance of motherly love as one of the elementary forces of human bonding, showing how imagination and passion work together in the life of humble people. Furthermore, the conclusion suggests that the sympathetic identification between the mother and the baby in Wordsworth’s poems, may be extended to, and serve as an analogue for, the relationship between the poet-narrator and the reader-interlocutor of his poetry.