Death and the Boy of Winander

Death and the Boy of Winander The death of Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander reflects his fascination with the eternal and the ephemeral. But there is an contradictory dimension to his thought; on the one hand, death stops the Boy's potential; on the other, death keeps the Boy of Winander from all of those corrupting factors and influences of adulthood. The Boy of Winander is cut off before he can fulfill his potential and preserved …showed first 75 words of 950 total…

…showed last 75 words of 950 total…the living presence would still subsist…but all meditations of mankind…by reason built or passion” would disappear (29-48). Wordsworth’s dilemma is disclosed in the following lines and somewhat reveals the nature of his obsession with death: “”why hath not the mind / some element to stamp her image on / in nature somewhat nearer to her own? / Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad / her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?” (44-48).