Wordsworth’s Empathetic Repetition and Tautology in 'Lyrical Ballads' Anonymous College

Critics like Stork have declared the majority of Wordsworth’s self-designated ‘ballads’ to not truly be ballads at all, since they are more interested in dwelling on thought or emotion than propelled by action, which he seems to admit in Part Second of ‘Hart-Leap Well’: ‘To freeze the blood I have no ready arts / 'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, / To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.’ Although he focuses on emotional and ideological shifts and the reader’s empathy for those changes, Wordsworth uses the limitations of the ballad form to create that empathy – particularly repetition and tautology, as repeated statements in popular ballads originate from the form’s origins as being sung and singers’ need to memorize lines, and he is particularly interested in elevating the mundane, like the workers’ songs of ballad origins, through the meditative focused spaces of his poetry.

In volume I of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth appended a note to ‘The Thorn’, regretting that he had not made the difference between him as the poet and ‘the character of the loquacious narrator’ clearer. In describing the traditional storyteller behind a ballad, he creates a kind of enclosing fiction around the main story: ‘The...