The “Natural” Flow of Death in Wordsworth and Hemans

Gabe Fine

Blog Post 4

Felicia Dorothea Hemans and William Wordsworth both explore concepts such as female suffering, unrequited love, and the power of Nature, in their respective poems, “Indian Woman’s Death Song” and “The Ruined Cottage.” Although they both seem to come to interestingly similar conclusions about how death, and in particular one associated with Nature, can transcend human suffering, they arrive at these conclusions in slightly different ways. Largely, these differing methods hinge on their female characters’ agency––that is, to what extent are they choosing to meet their ends, and what the implications of such a choosing might be.

            In Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage,” one of the speakers ultimately arrives at the comforting conclusion:

That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream that could not live
Where meditation was. (520-4)

This conclusion indicates that, although Margaret suffered during her life, the physical evidence of the Natural world engulfing her cottage is indicatory of the place of Margaret’s suffering in some sort of cosmic scheme. The introductory passage in our textbook describes this as Wordsworth’s discovery of “consolation through apprehension of a cosmic unity” (422). Margaret, in her death, has become part of the Natural world, and her ruined cottage is the physical manifestation of this.

            Hemans’ poem, “Indian Woman’s Death Song,” addresses the similar theme of some sort of transcendent quality of the natural world. As the speaker approaches the cataract, which is to be her doom, she sings of the power of the “dark foaming stream” to take her and her children to the “better shore” where “the soul shall find its youth” (31, 42). Although she mourns for her suffering, she willingly, even “triumphantly,” approaches her Natural doom, because she knows the waterfall can lead her and her child “to the glorious bowers where none are heard to weep” (11, 40). That is, in death, specifically a death into Nature, she can transcend the suffering of her life.

            However, the difference, in the end, comes down to the agency of Margaret and the Indian woman. It is one thing for a character to actively choose her doom, bringing her child with her in a Medea-like act of rebellion both against the unrequited love of a male world as well as its suffering, but it is another thing for two male speakers to passively decide that Margaret’s suffering, in the end, had its place in the universal flow of things. Margaret’s voice is only ever heard through paraphrase in “The Ruined Cottage.” Without knowing her thoughts, it becomes hard to believe the speaker when he attempts to comfort his friend (as well as the reader). The speaker is still alive, and in fact never suffered in the way Margaret did, because he was a man who could move about autonomously, while Margaret had to sorrowfully wait for her husband to return. Thus, though his vision of Margaret’s death is optimistic, it almost feels as if it is cheating her of acknowledging any true pain in her lifelong suffering.


Medea (about to murder her children) by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ferdinand_Victor_Delacroix_031.jpg