ABSTRACT
This chapter explores William Wordsworth's 'Gipsies', revealed a sophisticated anxiety about the related topics of poetry, property and labour; the speaker judges the gypsies harshly, but covertly envies them, and he cannot inscribe a convincing integrity to his own position. While 'Gipsies' has remained largely unread and certainly unanalysed, 'Michael' is understandably recognized as one of the great achievements of English poetry. If the hyperbole of 'Gipsies' was in part a result of the self-esteem attendant upon the glow of honest labour, then Simon Lee chronicles the act of labour itself. Simon Lee, first put before the public in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Looked at three of Wordsworth's shorter poems in considerable detail. Gipsies has been usually judged a failure, Michael a masterpiece, and Simon Lee something in between. These poems do not faithfully reproduce a simple external reality, but they inevitably reflect it, and comment upon it.
