Mark Ford

speaker

404 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Mark Ford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Close Readings · Narrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth · 5 Jul 2026 podcast

Yes, and he is a wanderer himself, and he meets another wanderer.

So really crucial to the whole Wordsworth programme is being unhoused, isn't it?

That you are somehow a vagrant.

You are, in that sense, almost...

Someone who has no place in society, who is living on the edges or on the margins and is always being attracted to marginal figures who are somehow anti-institutional or not part of institutions and who suffer for those reasons, but who are also presented as somehow leading a more authentic life.

Exactly.

And the lines that I also particularly like from the opening is when he looks upon the scene and the impending branches of the tree he's under make it more soft, more soft and distant.

I think that's really interesting because that captures exactly what you're talking about, the softness, but there's also this panoramic view which Wordsworth could never leave alone, that he was always climbing Mount Snowdon or the Alps to get a panoramic view, a cosmic sense of things.

And the relationship between the detail

The individual detail, for instance, the staff that rests undisturbed behind the door of the husband, Robert, when he's gone off to the war, that detail is something that you will never forget.

But Wordsworth also felt a need, which was partly, I guess, inspired by Coleridge, to fit the whole thing into a philosophical programme that would make sense of life, that was part of the new dispensation that happened

after the French Revolution and the dissolution of the 18th century or Enlightenment agreement.

And somehow everything is now up for grabs, and Wordsworth has to figure himself as the bard who will explain how to live in this new world.

But what's so extraordinary about this story is just the details, like the gorse.

That gorse bursting is so brilliant, isn't it?

Yes, and obviously he is in some ways a transposition of Wordsworth's own vision of himself.

And I talked about this as a supernova.

This peddler figure then inspires a whole other poem called The Peddler, doesn't it?

And all sorts of that material gets into the prelude.

And also there's a huge long passage after the peddler has metamorphosed into the wanderer.

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