Death and the Boy of Winander
The death of Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander reflects his fascination with the eternal and the ephemeral. But there is an contradictory dimension to his thought; on the one hand, death stops the Boy's potential; on the other, death keeps the Boy of Winander from all of those corrupting factors and influences of adulthood. The Boy of Winander is cut off before he can fulfill his potential and preserved in his purity, his closest relationship to the immortal, against the inevitable corruption of adulthood. According to Wordsworth, in our youth, we are closer to our natural immortality, man’s true state of being. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” but as the Boy becomes a man “shades of the prison-house begin to close” (65-67). Nevertheless, there is clearly a sense in which slumber seals the Boy of Winander’s spirit. This paradox between temporality and immortality represents Wordsworth’s fascination with death.With the image of the Boy, “fingers interwoven, both hands / pressed closely palm to palm” Wordsworth creates a link to the eternal nature of man (7-8). Nature becomes a place of communion with the immortal, a place where a child, closely linked with immortality, can experience transcendence
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 902
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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