“To Paint the Sorrows of Mankind”: Conscience and Catharsis in The Borderers

Abstract

The Borderers, written in 1796 between Wordsworth's landmark works of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and Lyrical Ballads, is the poet's only venture into the genre of drama. If the play is examined with its unique choice of genre in mind, it reveals a key transition in Wordsworth's aesthetic philosophy. The Salisbury Plain poems (1793–1795) resound a last cry from the bitterly disappointed idealist who had once seen himself as a pure moral voice in support of the French Revolution. Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, presents an altered voice of the poet who, in his own eyes, has perhaps fallen from grace yet not beyond rescue; who balances loss with hope; who seeks redemption in contact with nature and compassion for others. In between lies The Borderers, in which the careful reader might discover Wordsworth's focus shifting in emphasis from narcissistic self-concern to disinterested compassion for others. The corresponding dramatic action shifts from obsession with the tormented ethical arguments surrounding Wordsworth's stand-in debater, Mortimer, to interest in and empathy for society's marginalized poor, exemplified by the characters Robert and Margaret. The unsatisfactory ending of The Borderers finds resolution in Wordsworth's subsequent poetry, Lyrical Ballads.