MICHAEL, a pastoral narrative in 482 lines of blank verse, by William. Wordsworth, was composed and published in 1800. In a let ter to Fox, 14 Jan. 1801, Wordsworth writes: the two poems, The and I have attempted to draw a picture of the domestic affections, as I know they exist among a class of men who are now almost con fined to the north of England. They are small independent proprietors of land, here called statesmen, men of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties . . . Their little tract of land serves as a rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes them objects of memory in a thousand in stances, when they would otherwise be for The theme of Michael, as suggested in Wordsworth's letter, has two phases: the love of a ((statesman) for his little landed property in the hills, and of a father for his son. The story of the poem is founded upon fact. To Michael and his wife in their old age is born a son, Luke, whom his father cher ishes both as a companion and as his heir. When Luke is 18 years old, Michael, through the fault of another, loses a portion of his property. Luke must go to the city and there earn enough to redeem the land. Before the boy leaves, he lays the corner-stone of the sheepfold which he and his father were to build together, now left for the old man to build alone. Far away in the city, Luke is finally led away by bad companions and is heard from no more. The old father's heart is broken;
the sheepfold, symbol of his faith and love, is never finished.
'Michael) is an illustration of Wordsworth's theory that the emotions find their best soil in common life, where they "are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.) Michael himself is perhaps Words worth's ideal man, and, possibly because he was the type best known to the poet, is more clearly portrayed and more highly indi vidualized than any other of Wordsworth's characters. He has the ruggedness, strength and majesty of the Westmoreland hills among which he lives. The setting, the characters and the story of the poem are too interdependent, too integrally fused, to be separately analyzed. The style, classical in its simplicity and re straint, and stripped of all extraneous ornament almost to severity, is merely a crystal medium through which appears the essential poetry of the subject. The magical suggestiveness of such lines as "Hence had he learned the mining of all winds," and he had been alone "Amid the heart of many thousand mists," are far surpassed both in suggestiveness and essential poetry by the simple passage which states that the old broken-hearted father often tried to complete the sheepfold, and that "many and many a time he thither went "And never lifted up a single stone."