ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth's greatest narrative poems are about people whose love for each other threatens to make them blind and deaf to everything else. The Ruined Cottage, The Idiot Boy and Michael are all ambivalent towards the value of living so intensely, and yet so dangerously. But they vary enormously in plot, structure and tone, debating the paradox with quite different effects. By contrast The Ruined Cottage is bleakly centred on a broken home. Its title, like its heroine, Margaret, is confined to a place which appears to exclude the possibility of values which survive. So the earliest of Wordsworth's great narrative poems confronts an extreme which sets it apart from those that followed. It expresses a solemn fear that the very tenderness it respects can become utterly destructive, a chilling defect in our nature, to be seen, in the gravest sense, as 'the weakness of humanity'.
