pISSN: 1598-3293

영어영문학연구, Vol.59 no.2 (2017)
pp.137~154

William Wordsworth’s Anti-war Sentiments in “A Night on Salisbury Plain” (1793-1794)

Im, Bora

(Chonbuk National University)

In this article I will consider Wordsworth’s attitude to the French Revolutionary Wars in “A Night on Salisbury Plain” (NSP). Certainly NSP is an anti-war poem as critics have observed. But I would like to focus on fear in NSP and suggest that anti-war sympathy of the poem is strengthened by the fear of the war and bloodshed, by which Wordsworth was tormented while he was on Salisbury Plain. Wordsworth in NSP was afraid of the ongoing war, and therefore the poet opposed the war; the fear disturbed the balance of his mind. Wordsworth’s anti-war sentiment in NSP cannot be thought of as empty or insincere because the poem is the result of his own suffering or his agonizing imagining of the brutalities of war. Wordsworth’s recognition of the brutalities of the ongoing war led the poet to revise his thoughts about the French Revolution. While he stayed in France in 1791 and 1792, he witnessed, for example, the brutalities on the Gironde and the mass executions of them by guillotine, and the experience led the poet to think again about the revolutionary violence and the brutalities of the war; it was the driving force behind the composition of NSP, where the poet bitterly criticized the ongoing war.
  워즈워스,전쟁,공포,고딕 요소

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