The Reverie of Poor Susan
The Reverie of Poor Susan - meaning Summary
Memory Restores Rural Home
Wordsworth presents Poor Susan, a city washerwoman who, hearing a thrush near Wood Street, is briefly transported by memory into a vivid rural vision of hills, rivers and her beloved cottage. The poem contrasts the restorative power of imaginative memory with the empty materiality of urban life as the vision melts away and leaves her longing. It registers the poet’s interest in ordinary minds shaped by nature and memory.
Read Complete AnalysesAt the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
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