The Waggoner Canto Third - Analysis

Joy that outruns the road

The canto’s central pleasure is how quickly a hard, ordinary journey can be lifted into something like a procession of heroes—and how quickly that elevation can wobble. Wordsworth lets the night ride swell into near-mythic exultation, then repeatedly punctures it with the stubborn facts of bodies: a tired waggoner with clouded brains, eight horses, an ass, a mastiff, and a darkness where No Moon hath risen. The poem’s claim isn’t that imagination is false; it’s that it is social and fragile, forever bargaining with animal temper, weather, and fear. The journey becomes a test of what kind of fellowship survives when the mood shifts.

Even the opening insists on confidence where we might expect dread: the horses, though it is a moonless night, fear neither himself nor freight. Their faith in Benjamin—worth the best despite his impairment—sets a tone of rough loyalty. Yet the loyalty is not sentimental: if the horses had a prayer, it would be that no one else come near, and that Benjamin, drunk or sober, keep steering them. Trust here is not idealism; it’s a pragmatic choice inside limited options.

The poem’s lift: a shared hallucination of glory

The first major surge is the speaker’s own, as he joins the travellers’ elation: their inspiration I partake. The language suddenly turns hungry and upward—Still mounting to a higher height; / And higher still—as if the night itself were a ladder. What they see is not a stable landscape but a fever-bright pageant: shifting pictures, gleams / Of colour, and a world involved and restless. Sky, earth, and lake serene don’t stay in their proper places; they become one scene / Pregnant with creation. The joy is expansive enough to make the group’s gestures look like ritual: tears of rapture, vow-making, even solemn, vacant, interlacing as if they might fall asleep embracing.

That word vacant is a quiet warning inside the ecstasy. Their closeness has a blankness to it, a trance-like quality. The speaker celebrates the elevation, but he also notices how easily communal joy can become self-forgetting—arms linked not because a plan has been made, but because the mood is carrying everyone along.

The hinge: Benjamin’s practical interruption

The canto pivots on a blunt sentence that snaps the vision back to the road: That Ass of thine, / He spoils thy sport. It’s funny, almost rude, and it matters because it reintroduces friction into the excess of amity. Benjamin proposes a new arrangement—tether the ass to the waggon so the men can trudge it alongside like brother to brother. The brotherhood, in other words, is conditional: it needs logistics. The poem’s airy talk of empyreal spirits collapses into knots, rope, and placement.

And the animals register the emotional cost. The ass is reduced to The Creature, tied by the waggon’s skirts, while the mastiff is wondering, and perplext, full of dread at the new closeness. It’s a small domestic scene, but it echoes the bigger one: companions who were just embracing can, with one change of circumstance, become anxious roommates. The poem keeps insisting that fellowship is real—and also that it has teeth.

Waggon as ship: bravado against darkness

Once the ass is tethered, the night ride turns nautical. The waggon becomes a vessel with a VANGUARD that seems to sail with Sails spread. Benjamin’s speech leans into the metaphor: the sailor’s ship will travel without harm, and Benjamin praises the waggon’s shape and stature as if it were seaworthy. But the comparison is also a confession of suffering: he is a Poor pilot staggering through snows, surrounded by foundrous pit, cross-winds beating the quarter. The voyage language dignifies drudgery without denying it. Their handsome show is hard-won, made from persistence rather than glamour.

This is one of the canto’s key tensions: the poem wants the thrill of heroism, yet it keeps anchoring that thrill in discomfort—Grinding through rough and smooth, in foul and fair. Even Benjamin’s confidence ends with a hedge: God willing! The bravado is real, but it is stitched to vulnerability.

The owl and the ghost-story reflex

The sailor’s sudden plea—save us from yon screeching owl!—shows how fast the mind, in darkness, can slide from metaphor to superstition. The noise becomes worse than any funeral bell, and he jumps to a prophecy: We shall be meeting ghosts to-night! The comic camaraderie now flirts with panic. Immediately, the animals replay the same pattern in miniature: the mastiff, ill-conditioned, grows dissatisfied and starts a fray until the ass, with a lifted hind hoof, salutes him on the head. Violence produces better manners, and the road calms again—an unromantic moral that order often returns not through ideals but through consequences.

Benjamin’s response to the owl is equally unromantic: he claims he’d lay a thousand with his whip, then demystifies the sound by locating it on the banks of Windermere, where owls mock the ferry-man like travellers shouting for a boat. The cure is explanation—place the fear on a map, give it an occupation, make it ordinary. The sailor’s heart rises at once; he fears no man or devil. But that relief is not purely rational: it arrives with Benjamin’s manner and voice, suggesting that reassurance works as much through authority and tone as through facts.

A hard question the canto leaves hanging

If a story can create ghosts in an instant, and another story can erase them, what exactly are these travellers living in—night reality, or whatever narrative is currently strongest? Benjamin’s Windermere account is persuasive, yet his earlier boasts about whipping a thousand and steering while drunk or sober hint that confidence, too, may be a kind of spell. The canto keeps making comfort look like something the group manufactures together, then calls truth.

Ending in mock-epic motion

The finale lifts once more into spectacle: the sailor wheels, Brandished his crutch against the mountain tops, while Benjamin, among the stars, sees dancing and glancing like battle maneuvers since the days of Mars. It’s a deliberately outsized ending—half heroic, half comic—where disability (a crutch) becomes a banner and fear becomes choreography. By closing on retreating and advancing, Wordsworth suggests that the night’s emotional life is a series of charges and withdrawals: exaltation, irritation, dread, relief, bravado. The canto doesn’t settle on one mood as the true one. Instead, it argues—through horses that trust, men who embrace, animals that quarrel, and an owl that briefly becomes a funeral bell—that the journey’s meaning is made in the continual, precarious act of keeping company through the dark.