Analyzing The Idiot Boy

Analyzing The Idiot Boy

William Wordsworth's poem "The Idiot Boy" is perhaps atypical of much of Wordsworth's other works in that it tells a story in which the author is himself not a character. Many of Wordsworth's poems seem to involve him either coming upon a person or place, or explicitly remembering doing so. Here, if this poem is a memory, it is not announced as such.

The regular rhyme scheme -- A-B-C-C-B -- gives the poem a nursery-rhyme quality. In many places, the style seems to overpower the content: stanza 47 seems constructed solely to showcase the rhyme it contains: "Perhaps he's climbed into an oak / Where he will stay till he is dead" (ll. 233-234) is not really a worrisome fate, but it rhymes neatly with the last two lines of the stanza.

Several things, major and minor, about this poem may strike the reader as atypical of Wordsworth's work. The very first stanza of the poem gives us only the general setting: "'Tis eight o'clock, -- a clear March night, / The moon is up -- the sky is blue [...]" (ll. 1-2). Wordsworth's poems frequently begin on a more general scale, and narrow in for a few stanzas on a very specific location. Here we are given a sketchy background and left at that.

The next four stanzas speak directly to Betty Foy, a woman who for unknown purpose is putting her idiot son on a horse, making him ready to ride into the night. The narrator is apparently ignorant of the reason for this moonlight ride, but is still disapproving, telling Betty to "put him down again" (l. 18) and saying "There's not a mother, no not one, / But when she hears what you have done, / Oh! Betty she'll be in a fright," (ll. 24-26).

In the sixth stanza we learn the reason for this trip, and the poem is almos...

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... as it is, but alters his vision to fit his mind.

The fact that Johnny had to be parted from his mother to acquire his insight is significant too. Wordsworth's parents died, leaving him, and that one of his major recurring themes is the attempt to return to that childhood innocence of when they were alive. Seen in this light, the fact that Johnny is an idiot, an over-grown child, becomes more than just a detail of plot. Wordsworth allows himself a happy ending in this poem: after complaining to the Muses that he has been their slave for fourteen years, he has mother and son re-united. Johnny's "glory" (l. 462) is that he can retain the uniqueness of his viewpoint and observations, and not sacrifice that state of childhood innocence.

Work Cited

Stephen Gill, editor. The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, pp. 67-80. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.