Wordsworth – The Thorn

This poem opens with a description of an old, gnarled thorn growing on a mountaintop, near a muddy pond and a small mound, about the size of a child’s grave. We are given to understand that it is well tended and very beautiful, with a gorgeous array of colors, green, red, white; moss and flowers growing on the child’s grave.

There is a woman there in a scarlet cloak (imagery evocative of a “scarlet woman,” so already bringing in the Fallen Woman trope) weeping and crying “misery!” and “woe is me.” She is always there beside the thorn, and always lamenting. The idea that the thorn is old and gnarled may give some indication that this grave has been there a long time too. The woman may not be a young mother recently bereaved, then, but an older woman lamenting an old loss. She lives in a hut near the spot, and the speaker states that the grave is such a beautiful spot that if one spots her in her hut, one should go straight to the spot and enjoy it while possible, because no one dares go near it while she’s there. I find this kind of insensitive; the spot is beautiful because it is the well-tended grave of a child she buried and still grieves almost night and day. Maybe it is because I think grief is and should be private, and this speaker is intrusive in his desire to go look at the grave’s beautiful colors, and rude in even just his awareness that she’s always there, since he hints she’s blocking the spot from his and perhaps other people’s enjoyment.

Then we get some of her history: He states “Full twenty years are past and gone” since she, Martha Ray, was to give her hand in marriage to one Stephen Hill, but he left her at the altar and married another girl, and she was left heartbroken. The speaker is sympathetic to her plight, saying “Poor Martha!” Six months later, she is always going up to the mountaintop and it is clear that she is pregnant. She is exceedingly sad, and some people in the village gossip that the unborn child is actually helping clear her depression and restore her to a more healthful state of mind: “And when at last her time drew near / Her looks were calm, her senses clear.” But the story stops there. No one knows what happened – she would often go up into the mountains, and nobody knows if the baby was stillborn, or if it was born alive and she killed it. The speaker mentions some people think she hanged the baby from a nearby tree, or drowned it in the muddy pond, but everyone agrees that the mossy mound is where she buried the baby.

“I’ve heard, the moss is spotted red

With drops of that poor infant’s blood;

But kill a new-born infant thus,

I do not think she could!

Then there’s a bit about how if you go to the pond and look into the water, the baby will look back out at you, and that there have been people who wanted to dig up the bones and bring her to justice, but when they tried, the land began to shake and it scared them off, so there’s an element of the supernatural at play here, or at least superstition. The speaker says “I cannot tell how this may be” and does not really comment on that further, just states that the thorn is always struggling up against the moss that seems bent on dragging it down to the earth, and the woman is always there wailing and crying “misery” and so she and the thorn, both aged, gnarled, past blooming, keep their sorry vigil over the child’s grave.