Post for Week Three: "The Thorn" and "The Sensitive Plant"

Because we didn’t get to it last week, I thought I would examine Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” specifically as it relates to Shelly’s “The Sensitive Plant.” As we briefly mentioned at the tail-end of class last week, Wordsworth seems to rightly peg the miserable heroine of his poem as a universal trope. We were able, quickly, to come up with a few similar fables and stories across the globe, including the legend of La Llorona and Medea. But what I’m most curious about is Wordsworth’s scope of the tale. He writes that “she is known to every star.” The interesting push here is the total universality of the weeping woman’s condition. The thorn, of course, is the stand in for the woman, and WW goes to great length, describing the thorn's condition progressively wearing into the morbid, knobby figure lurking atop the mountain. This puts in my mind of Shelly’s “Sensitive Plant” in that, here too we have a sympathetic, seemingly miserable central botanical stand-in for the human. The sensitive plant is a waste by the end of the play, as is its caretaker, the myth-seeming, universalized “Lady.” The most surprising turn in “Sensitive Plant” is the Lady’s death. The Lady, on first brush, seems almost to be the immortal mother earth balance to the Father sky. This predictable trope is thankfully turned on its head when the woman dies, alone it seems, and nobody is left to tend to the garden. What can we make of the timeless seeming decomposition in both plays? Is the lesson/idea the degeneracy of life, the transcendent possibilities of the material, or something else? And does the scope of each poem serve in its function?