Poem
The poem is of 463 lines and is written in five-line stanzas with a varying rhyme scheme. It was first published in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, where it appeared between The Mad Mother and Lines Written Near Richmond.
The poem is narrative in form. Set in the countryside, it tells the story of Betty Foy and her mentally handicapped son. Foy's neighbor Susan is sick; Foy has no choice but to send her son into the nearby village to fetch the doctor. She places him on her pony and sends him on his way. When he has not returned after several hours, she grows worried and sets off to find him. The doctor has not seen the boy; finally, she finds him placidly astride his pony, who is grazing near a stream. As they are walking home, they encounter Susan, who has, as it were, worried herself well and come in search of her friend.
Read more about this topic: The Idiot Boy
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”
—Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)
“And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.