‘These Common Woes I Feel’: The Elegist and the Reader in Wordsworth and Shelley

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Shelley’s approach to the elegy owes a significant debt to Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, particularly Wordsworth’s examination of the relationship between the elegist and the reader. While the elegy often extols the value of communal bonds and shared experiences in responding effectively to grief, the ‘Lucy’ poems use reticence and obfuscation to qualify the reader’s engagement with the emotional experiences that constitute an elegy. Through this, Wordsworth questions the possibility of the elegist and the reader experiencing a unified response to loss. Identifying the importance of these techniques to Wordsworthian elegy, Shelley’s sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’ shows him inheriting Wordsworth’s belief that any elegy must negotiate between ‘common woes’ and individual feeling. The later Adonais represents Shelley’s fullest reimagining of Wordsworth’s methods. By presenting the poet as a solitary and inscrutable figure, Shelley highlights a disjunction between the universal resonance of death and the elegist’s irrevocably personal perspective on grief. Magnifying the tensions implicit in all elegies, both poets open up a distance between the elegist and the reader to explore broader distinctions between individual and communal experiences of loss.