Death and the Boy of Winander

A detailed Summary of 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

In "Ode" Wordsworth writes that "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / the soul that rises with us, our life's star...cometh...trailing clouds of glory...from God, who is our home" (58-65). However, the Boy of Winander died at a time in his mortal life when he was closest to this immortality, a time of communion with nature. The final silence of the Boy of Winander is anticipated both by the silent owls and by the "pauses of deep silence" in which he sometimes hangs listening (17). The paradox is that man's spirit is a reflection of immortality and is only able to manifest that immortality in productions which, because they are material, are ultimately mortal. Therefore, man's spirit is as mortal as the human body that encases it. Ultimately, this contradiction between the nature of immortality and the temporal shown by the death of a ten-year-old that causes the narrator to stand "a full half hour...Mute" at the grave of the Boy of Winander. The passage in which the Boy hangs listening also reflects a loss of consistency between immortality and nature; an experience produced by death and that foreshadows his death.

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Approximate Word count = 902
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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