ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter opens with William Wordsworth: “I too have been a wanderer….” It proceeds to focus on two contrasting wanderers who appear in his long narrative poem The Excursion (1814). The main character is a rural pedlar known as The Wanderer. Wandering puts him in close touch with the uncorrupted human heart and with the soul-building qualities of nature. On his travels, he regularly visits a rural cottage where Margaret lives with her husband and child. The family, through blight and war, are left destitute. The husband wanders off and soon Margaret shares his fate. “About the fields I wander,” she tells the pedlar, “knowing this/ Only, that what I seek I cannot find; And so I waste my time….” This darker Wordsworth recognizes not only innocent suffering but also the emotional toll that suffering entails on the person who witnesses it. The Wanderer’s capacity to empathize with Margaret’s suffering depends on the emotional resources (from his wandering education) that allow him to afford—a crucial, jarring word—to enter into and prove witness to a human suffering that he cannot possibly relieve.
