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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in B. Wordsworth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity Construction
Art and the Artist’s Life
Unconventional Friendship
The Wonder of Nature
Living and Dying
Summary
Analysis
Like the several “beggars” who regularly appear at the narrator’s house, a strange man comes into the yard one afternoon and asks if he might watch the bees that populate the palm trees in the yard. Despite his mother’s skepticism, the narrator (a young boy at the time) stays with the man while he watches the bees. The man calls himself a poet and introduces himself as B. Wordsworth, claiming that the “B” stands for “Black Wordsworth” and that he and the “white Wordsworth” (that is, the famous Romantic poet William Wordsworth) are brothers who “share one heart.” B. Wordsworth offers to sell his poetry, but the narrator’s mother has no interest. The narrator wonders if many people buy his poems, and B. Wordsworth admits that he has yet to sell any. Once B. Wordsworth leaves, the narrator hopes to see him again.
It very quickly becomes clear that B. Wordsworth is not just another “beggar”; his real interest is in observing the unusual spectacle of the bees swarming the palm trees in the boy’s front yard. The swarming bees suggest the dynamic life that he himself possesses, a vitality that is reflected in his willingness to engage the boy in conversation. A further difference between B. Wordsworth and the “beggars” is reflected in the feeble attempt he makes to sell the boy his poetry, It is his identification with the poetry itself that is most important. This identification is made clear in his self-professed name—a name that, in its reference to the great English poet, is a powerful marker of identity for him. The age difference between the two is likewise of much less interest to B. Wordsworth than simply the possibility of creating a bond based upon mutual sympathies and worldviews.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator runs into B. Wordsworth a week later when returning home from school. B. Wordsworth invites the narrator to come eat mangoes from the mango tree that grows in his yard. The narrator is struck by how green B. Wordsworth’s yard is and by the variety of trees in it. When the narrator returns home after eating a mango, his mother beats him for not coming home on time. The narrator runs away and returns to B. Wordsworth, who consoles him and takes him for a walk. When it grows dark, B. Wordsworth suggests they lie on the ground and look up at the stars. The narrator is overwhelmed with a sense of his own smallness and the greatness of the stars.
The friendship that begins to develop between B. Wordsworth and the boy is in part that of guide to disciple. The wonder the boy experiences upon seeing B. Wordsworth’s lush yard with its fruit trees and the juicy mango the boy eats are both experiences that open him up to the richness and vitality of life. The life B. Wordsworth represents is a far cry from the narrator’s cramped, abusive home life, and B. Wordsworth is both the tempter leading him out of that life and the guide initiating him into the mysteries that exist in the world outside the boy’s home. B. Wordsworth introduces the boy, for example, to the grand, majestic mysteries of the cosmos, an experience that fills the boy with a sense of his smallness and the universe’s greatness. The stars the boy beholds, that is, reflect a sense of transcendence; a sense of being both intensely part of and lifted out of the world that he inhabits.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator and B. Wordsworth become friends. B. Wordsworth makes the narrator promise not to talk to anyone about him or his fruit trees and, in response to a question the narrator asks about his overgrown yard, he shares a sad story about two young poets who once fell in love, got married, and prepared to have a child—but the wife died while pregnant. After the wife died, the husband decided that he wouldn’t change anything in the garden, which his wife had loved so dearly. The narrator is moved by the story. The two go for long walks together and visit various places around town. The narrator notes that B. Wordsworth does “everything as though he were doing it for the first time” and that, because of this, the world has become a “most exciting place.”
One day, B. Wordsworth shares that he is working on a project that involves writing one line of poetry a month. He claims that, when finished, it will be “the greatest poem in the world.” He shares the line he wrote the previous month: “The past is deep.” The narrator is “filled with wonder” when B. Wordsworth says that his poem will “sing to all humanity.”
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While out walking along the water one day, the narrator asks B. Wordsworth if he should drop a pin into the water to see what will happen. B. Wordsworth encourages him to do so, and the pin sinks. When the narrator questions him about his poetry, B. Wordsworth gives a dismissive reply—from this point on, he never shares lines from his in-progress poem again.
The narrator notices that B. Wordsworth is growing older and asks him how he earns money. B. Wordsworth says that he sings calypsos. Later, the narrator visits B. Wordsworth and sees that he is dying. When the narrator bursts into tears, B. Wordsworth says that he will tell one last story and that the narrator must then leave and never return. B. Wordsworth says that the story he told the narrator about the pregnant poet wife who died wasn’t true and that he also made up the story about writing the greatest poem in the world. B. Wordsworth pretends to find this funny, but his voice breaks as he finishes speaking. The narrator leaves the house in tears.
