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:
“There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“A poem ... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.... It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:
The lover, the believer and the poet.
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language, when it is themselves.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)