A Complaint

The poem reveals the joy of friendship. It is, granted, a difficult, even ironic strategy to illuminate the sheer joy of friendship that actually centers the emotional argument of Wordsworth’s poem by chronicling its absence. Given the poem’s melancholic tone and how the poet so carefully anatomizes his sense of loss, the poem argues the joy of friendship by laying out the poet’s emotions in the absence of that friendship. It is as if you learn the joy of freedom by reading a stark account of imprisonment. The poet wants to be sufficiently contented by having had the experience of that friendship—but the physical absence of that Other too deeply lacerates his heart.

The poem shares the agonies of a heart in recoil. Given the poet’s uncertain relationship with his own memories, the speaker never actually provides the context. We never share the joys of the friendship—those are memories that the speaker admits are too painful to dwell on. The departed person is defined solely by the second person pronouns in the first two lines, a definition that stays generic, distant, reflecting the poet’s own physical distance from that Other. After those opening two lines, the poem denies the absent Other any presence.