The Female Vagrant

One poem that differs greatly from The Dungeon and The Convict is The Female Vagrant. However, although the poem differs in setting and narrative, it nonetheless captivates the suffering of a person as a result of the social and political agendas of the time.

Wordsworth evokes sympathy from the offset in the juxtaposition of the noun "female" with the adjective "vagrant" in the title of the poem.

This is effective because Wordsworth stresses that it is a "female" who is aimless and "vagrant" in disposition, as oppose to a man; preparing the audience for the tragedy of the poem.

The poem is also written in a first person perspective, which heightens the level of sympathy from the reader due to the intense level of emotion expressed through the protagonist's tale. One example of this intense emotion is shown through the metaphor; "through tears that fell in showers", after the repossession of her family's home.

This line could easily have been a simile, but Wordsworth chooses a metaphor in order to fully accentuate the profound emotional connection that the woman had to her home.

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Her crying in the form of "showers" also evokes an image of sympathy because of the realisation that she has now become homeless and poverty stricken.

One other technique used by Wordsworth in The Female Vagrant can be seen in the alliteration of the words "dried up, despairing, desolate". The alliteration of the'd's serve to illustrate the impact of the events which have caused her to become highly melancholic.

Although sympathetic in its own right, these words (and the rest of the poem) have more poignancy when contrasted with the woman's idyllic life at the beginning of the poem.

Wordsworth deliberately constructed lines such as "with thoughtless joy I stretch'd along the shore" in the first stanza in order to heighten the heartbreak of her tale later in the poem. This line in particular acts as a stark contrast to the line "for no earthly friend/ Have I. -" in the final stanza, when describing her loss of dignity and eternal solitude.

The words "thoughtless joy" in the first stanza are countered by the technique of enjambment in the words "Have I. -". Wordsworth isolates these words through a full-stop and a hyphen in order to visually illustrate the woman's destitute isolation, defining her tale as extremely sympathetic and woeful.

Wordsworth and Coleridge elicit sympathy from the reader through a variety of literary techniques. In The Dungeon, Coleridge uses an irate narrator in order to display the inhumanity of the penal system and how it affects the man. Similarly in The Convict, Wordsworth uses the onlooker as the catalyst for sympathy between the convict and the reader.

Although different in narrative, The Female Vagrant also utilizes a narrator in the final line of the poem in order to describe how the woman could not finish her tale because "She wept; - because she had no more to say". The device of the narrator to evoke sympathy is successfully used by Wordsworth in The Female Vagrant in order to visually summarise her utter heartache at the death of her family and the loss of her home.