A Complaint — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
A Complaint
The poems
What you need to know
The speaker grieves for a love or friendship that once flowed freely towards him and has now gone quiet, leaving him feeling poor.
How Wordsworth's extended metaphor turns a love that flowed like a fountain into a hidden well, with questions and dashes that show his hurt.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'There is a change—and I am poor', 'A fountain at my fond heart's door', 'Whose only business was to flow', 'Blest was I then all bliss above!', 'Of murmuring, sparkling, living love', 'What have I? shall I dare to tell?', 'A comfortless and hidden well', 'A well of love—it may be deep', 'In silence and obscurity', 'hath made me poor'.
Form: three six-line stanzas rhyming ABABCC, moving from the fountain of the past to the well of the present, with a final couplet that returns to the change and the poverty of the first line.
Context: published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807); Wordsworth's friendship with Coleridge, his partner in Lyrical Ballads, which suffered after Coleridge came home from Malta in 1806 and broke in a quarrel in 1810, one way of reading the change the poem mourns.
Compares well with: Neutral Tones (love that has cooled), One Flesh (closeness turned to silence), My Father Would Not Show Us (someone who withdraws) and Sonnet 43 (overflowing love set against love that has dried up).
