By William Wordsworth

 

I Travelled among Unknown Men

Table of Contents

I travelled among unknown Men,

In Lands beyond the Sea;

Nor England! did 1 know till then

What love I bore to thee.

 

’Tis past, that melancholy dream!

Nor will I quit thy shore

A second time; for still I seem

To love thee more and more.

 

Among thy mountains did 1 feel

The joy of my desire;

And She I cherished turned her wheel

 Beside an English fire.

 

Thy mornings shewed-thy nights concealed

The bowers where Lucy played;

 And thine too is the last green field

That Lucy’s eyes surveyed!

 

Wordsworth’s “I travelled among unknown men” appears at first to be a tribute to a woman he loved and a poem of patriotism. It is initially unclear how Lucy and England are similar beyond being things that are ultimately important to him. Through further interpretations, it becomes evident that Wordsworth used specific tools such as personification and images of nature to connect the two beyond the reader’s first reaction. After the reader realizes how Lucy and England are tied together, the feelings of loss that Wordsworth’s “melancholy” experience of travel related to his feelings towards the death of Lucy as a travel experience and not just a deportation from his life. This poem is in turn not a statement about life and love, but a statement about death as a permanent journey.

In the first two stanzas, Wordsworth chooses not to mention Lucy in an effort to put emphasis on the importance of his love and devotion to England. He resolves to have not understood “what love [he] bore to [England]” (4) until he left England to travel to other lands. He describes his travelling adventures as a “melancholy dream” (5) and promises to not “quit [England’s] shore/A second time” (6-7). In making this promise, he is recognizing not only the importance that his travel played in his love for England but also, he is realizing that in his path of travel, he is given a second chance; Lucy’s travel away from England is permanent.

Wordsworth also uses tactics of personification throughout the poem. He chooses to personify England and describe feelings of human love and devotion towards it. Personifying England makes it easier for the reader to connect the country to Lucy since it already seems so human. Wordsworth also decides to describe his travels abroad by the people he encountered rather than the landscapes themselves. In doing this, he is conveying to the reader the importance of a personal connection with people in his life. Travelling in a foreign territory “among unknown men” would undoubtedly create feelings of unfamiliarity and a sense of feeling lost until he returned home to England. 

In these observations, the reader must also realize that Lucy herself has travelled in a sense. Once the reader realizes that both Wordsworth and Lucy have left England in their own ways, this poem becomes not a poem declaring timeless love, but a description of what death must be like. This can be interpreted in two ways, depending on the reader’s experience with other Wordsworth poetry.

A reader who is not familiar with other works may interpret Lucy’s death would be a horrible experience and a departure from her home. Wordsworth left England only temporarily and feels as if his journey was a miserable experience that left him in an altered state of consciousness, much like a “melancholy dream” (5). He can return to England and renew his faith and love for it; feelings of happiness are brought back to his life once he returns. Lucy has permanently travelled away from England. She will never be able to return and regain feelings of happiness and hope. 

The reader is then forced to question if this melancholy altered state Wordsworth temporarily found himself in while travelling is the fate of Lucy permanently because her travels will never bring her back. However, a reader who is more familiar with Wordsworth’s works and his style would know that as a romantic poet, his poetry places emphasis on the natural world, imagination and religion, among other themes. Wordsworth would believe that Heaven is home and Earth is just a temporary stop along a person’s journey in life. 

He claims that from “trailing clouds of glory do [humans] come/From God, who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (Ode 64-66) and refers to Heaven as “that imperial palace” (Ode 83). Wordsworth is placing Heaven as the holiest and happiest place where our immortal souls will live. Knowing this, the reader would be able to conclude that Lucy is, in fact, going home, to Heaven, and will be happier there.

Wordsworth makes a promise to his country:

 Nor will I quit thy shore/A the second time; for still I seem/To love thee more and more” (6-8). He only realized the importance of England in his life after he had left. When he returned, he felt his love for his country grow every day and he could relish in the things that he loved most about his country, but only as they were connected to Lucy. This promise may have been made to his country because he was wishful that he could tell Lucy he would never leave her again, or because he had the realization that the miserable life he led temporarily is the misery that Lucy would contain forever.

Wordsworth’s “I travelled among unknown men” appears at first to be a simple love poem but concludes on a much deeper level. He is explaining to the reader the travels that are taken, both temporarily and permanently; it is up to the reader to conclude whether Lucy’s permanent journey away from England to Heaven is a journey to her home or away from it. Wordsworth is connecting his travels and Lucy’s death through the description of his own journey away from England. This poem is much more than a love story; it is a testimony of the life and death experience of mankind.

“I travelled among unknown men” is a love poem completed in April 1801 [1] by the English poet William Wordsworth and originally intended for the Lyrical Ballads anthology, but it was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807 (see 1807 in poetry). The third poem of Wordsworth's " Lucy series ", "I travelled..." was composed after the poet had spent time living in Germany in 1798. Due to acute homesickness, the lyrics promise that once returned to England, he will never live abroad again. The poet states he now loves England "more and more". [2] Wordsworth realizes that he did not know how much he loved England until he lived abroad and uses this insight as an analogy to understand his unrequited feelings for his beloved, Lucy. [3]

Although "I travelled..." was written two years after the other four poems in the series, in both tone and language it closely echoes the earlier work. [4] Wordsworth gives no hint as to the identity of Lucy, and although he stated in the introduction that all the poems were 'founded on fact', knowing the basis for the character of Lucy is not necessary to appreciate the poem and its sentiment. Earlier critics assumed she represents a youthful love of Wordsworth who had died, but modern scholarship believes she was likely a hybrid or largely fictitious. Similarly, no insight can be gained from determining the exact geographical location of the 'springs of Dove'; in his youth, Wordsworth had visited springs of that name in Derbyshire, Patterdale and Yorkshire. [4]

The poem is filled with conflict and contradictions. Comparing the irony of the usage of the words "among" and "unknown" in the poem's title, the critic Mark Jones concluded that 'unknown' indicated the poet finally realizes the depth of his feelings for Lucy. Jones wrote, "These are paradoxes of memory and belated appreciation, and they turn on the question of what it is to know, as the two uses of this word in the first stanza indicate". [3] The language used is highly nostalgic for a personal and societal ideal, according to critic Dudley Fitts it "expresses with quiet assurance the value of a life lived within the protective circle of a national and social tradition". [5]

Lucy's only appearance is in the second half of the poem, where she is linked with the English landscape. As such, it seems as if nature joins with the narrator in mourning over Lucy, and the reader is drawn to this mutual sorrow. Although the poem focuses on death, it transitions into a poem describing the narrator's love for England and nature. [6]

'Tis past, that melancholy dream!

Nor will I quit thy shore

A second time; for still I seem

To love thee more and more. (lines 5–8)

 

Critical Analysis of "I Travelled Among Unknown Men" by Wordsworth

This is a poem of love and nostalgia for one home's country. Wordsworth wrote it after travelling abroad for some time, and finding that when he went abroad it was not the exciting experience that he thought it would be. He describes it as moving "among unknown men" which indicates how lonely he felt. The first stanza balances this experience of travel with an evocation of the love that the speaker has for England in the second half with England being apostrophized.

Now that the speaker is back in his beloved England, he looks back on his foreign travel as a "melancholy dream" and swears that he will never leave England again because the love he has for his country is just growing greater and greater. It was only among the mountains of England that Wordsworth felt "the joy of his desire" and also Lucy, the subject of Wordsworth's longings and unrequited love, is a figure who is rooted firmly in English soil. The fact that Lucy lived, played and died in England is another factor that makes England so important to the speaker:

 

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed

The bowers where Lucy played;

And thine too is the last green field

That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

Not only does the speaker have a strong connection with his home country but he also has another attachment as England is the location where he loved and lost his beloved Lucy. The connection that he feels to her even after her death is something that makes England forever special in his mind.

Summary and Analysis

“I Travelled Among Unknown Men,” by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), is written in the simple, clear, colloquial style that Wordsworth helped champion as one of the original Romantic poets. The poets who embraced Romanticism objected to the often ornate, “artificial” style of language used by many authors of the eighteenth century. Poems by those earlier writers were often filled with allusions to classical literature, especially to gods and goddesses whom no one believed and who seemed quite remote from the lives of common people. 

The audience for such poetry was well-educated, often from the upper strata of society. Much of Wordsworth’s poetry, in contrast, can easily be read and appreciated by anyone. As its titular opening line implies, “I Travelled Among Unknown Men” deals with personal experience in the real world.

Like many Romantic poems, this work features the thoughts and feelings of a person a “man speaking to men,” as Wordsworth himself once phrased the ideal. Even people who have not travelled abroad can easily relate to the idea that we especially appreciate our homes when we return to them after having been away. In this poem, the speaker refers to “unknown” people (1) in a way that implies people who are not only unfamiliar but who have a different culture and speak a different language. 

These are people, in other words, who are not only geographically distant but also culturally distinct. The fact that they live in “lands” (plural) “beyond the sea” (2) suggests that they are people from a variety of different countries. Imagine how different the impact of the second line would be if it read “In a place across the stream.” The speaker wants to emphasize his contact with people of a variety of nationalities in places significantly distant from his own country.

Not until the second half of the first stanza do we realize the precise significance of the traveller’s travels: They have made him appreciate his country much more fully than he had before. Travelling abroad helped him learn not only about foreign lands but also about his own psyche; he had not realized, until his travels, how much he loved his own country. The fact that he did travel shows that he is not a narrow-minded jingoist. We can assume he realized that learning about other countries might be valuable. 

However, the added and apparently unexpected benefit of such travels is that they have brought home to him the attractions of his own nation. He doesn’t praise England simply because he is an ignorant patriot, unfamiliar with other lands; instead, he praises England precisely because he is familiar with other nations and their peoples. 

Nor does he simply mention his love of England; he exclaims it (3). He now realizes how much love he “bore” to England a verb that can refer not only to how much love he felt for his homeland but also to how much love he brought back with him when he returned to his native country. The phrase “bore to” makes his love sound more weighty and substantial than would be the case if Wordsworth had written something like “felt...

Willaim Wordsworth Biography

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