Lyrical Ballads - The Female Vagrant Analysis - Revision Cards in A Level and IB English Literature

Summary of the poem (AO1)

Vagrant: a person without a settled home or regular work who wanders from place to place and lives by begging
- She is recounting her story
Made homeless by urbanisation - father would not take bribe
- ‘All, all was seized’, ‘We sought a home where we uninjured might abide’
Move in with the girl’s lover (eventually husband), lack of work in rural communities, father dies
War = job opportunity
Husband + children lost to war, disease + famine
- ‘Husband and children! one by one, by sword / And ravenous plague, all perished’
Lived 'Three years a wanderer'

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Written in the first person: allows for extended sympathy
‘Dried up, despairing, desolate’ - alliteration, ‘thudding’ sound of her journey and heavy impact of events
‘Here will I weep in peace’ - lost ambition and hope, can only weep over losses
‘my ready tomb the ocean-floor’ - meditating on death, ready to leave pain behind
Significance of last lines:
- ‘She wept; - because she had no more to say / Of that perpetual weight which on her spirit lay’ - overcome with grief, experience has harmed her both physically + spiritually, she has endured too much

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The Thorn
- Abandoned mothers + those who have suffered extreme hardship, telling a tale
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere
- Enduring hardship, however the ‘female vagrant’s’ is purely unfortunate circumstance and the mariner’s is intended punishment
  - Further links to The Convict
The Dungeon
- Spiritual misery - ‘till his very soul / Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed’, the weight of enduring pain
Old Man Travelling
- Theme of grief + outer tranquility while experiencing physical and mental deterioration/decay

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Feminist interpretation:
- A demonstration of how heavily women relied on men during this time - ‘the female vagrant’ is not self-sustaining and always needs a man (her father → her husband)
Romanticism and the Rural Community, Simon White
- ‘The two places (Salisbury Plain and the female vagrants Cumberland) are connected through the motif of a dead or dying countryside.’
  - Wordsworth spent two days wandering on foot over Salisbury Plain - source of inspiration for the setting of The Female Vagrant
- ‘The only robust community represented in the poem is one that exists outside of mainstream society.’
  - A criticism of capitalism, in Britain she is taken in by gypsies
‘Advertisement’ to the first printing of ‘Guilt and Sorrow’, 1842, William Wordsworth

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Industrialisation and Urbanisation:
- Reduced work opportunities in rural areas, forced people to move ‘to a distant town’ to pursue jobs
- Forced rural folk out of their homes
The Enclosures Act of the 18th Century
- Led to many rural dwellers being forced to give up their conventional land to the wealthy who had bought it
- Series of UK acts of Parliament that enclosed open fields + common land in the countryside, creating legal property rights to land previously considered common
Wordsworth’s travels
- Experienced ‘a long residence in revolutionary France’, surrounded by radicals + learnt to feel great sympathy for abandoned mothers, beggars, and victims of war

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