“A Complaint” Introduction

• "A Complaint" is a short poem by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Published in 1807, the poem is often taken as being about Wordsworth's falling out with his close friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though it can also be read as a commentary on the pain of lost love more generally. The poem portrays the love that speaker used to have as a life-enriching force. The loss of this love, in turn, feels like a wellspring of joy has suddenly dried up. In this way, the poem captures the despair felt by anyone who has lost the love of someone dear and can't seem to stop thinking about what used to be.

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“A Complaint” Summary

• Something has changed and left me feeling poor. It wasn't that long that your love flowed like a fountain into my heart. All that fountain of love cared about was flowing, and so that's exactly what it did; that love simply flowed without paying any attention to just how bountiful it was, or even to how much I needed it.

  We had so many good times together! I felt like the happiest person in the world! Now what, in exchange for that lively, flowing wellspring of love, am I left with? Do I even want to say it? All I have now is a well that's hidden away and doesn't offer any comfort.

  The well of love I have now is certainly deep, and it's never empty, but what does that even matter, given that the waters of love that once flowed so freely are now lying low, hidden and silent? This change, within my loving heart itself, has left me bereft.

“A Complaint” Themes

• 

  Loss, Loss, and Memory

  “A Complaint” explores the lasting pain of a broken heart. The poem's speaker has experienced a major "change," in the sense that a deep, meaningful relationship has ended. Whereas a “fountain” of love once flowed in abundance in the speaker’s heart, love’s metaphorical waters lie stagnant now that the speaker's beloved is gone. The poem thus presents love as a kind of wealth—a rich, vitalizing force, the loss of which makes the speaker feel "poor." What's more, the fact that the speaker keeps comparing memories of this relationship to the miserable present suggests that the hardest part of losing someone isn’t necessarily the absence of love itself, but the constant memory of what used to be.

  The poem begins by recalling the “fountain” of love that, not long ago, flowed in the speaker’s heart. The speaker remembers the “bliss” of this “murmuring, sparkling, living love,” and the many “happy moments” it created. Yet this love having once been so great, the poem implies, has simply made its loss harder to bear. As the poem goes on to contrast this free-flowing love fountain with the speaker's current "comfortless and hidden well," it becomes clear that recalling all this past "bliss" just makes the speaker's present misery stand out more starkly.

  The speaker seems to be struggling so much, at least in part, precisely because the speaker is so conscious of this "change" in circumstances—that is, of the difference between what the speaker once had and what the speaker now has. By attributing this current poverty specifically to "change" rather than the simple absence of the speaker’s beloved, the poem indirectly makes the point that to have loved and lost—to have experienced bliss only to have it taken away—is possibly more painful than to have never loved at all.

  The pain of lost love is so intense and all-consuming, in fact, that neither happy memories nor the expectation of future love can provide the speaker any consolation. Though the speaker knows that their well is “deep” and “never dry”—implying the speaker's love for this other person is still there (or, to use the water-related metaphor, hasn't dried up)—that doesn't matter. Right now, the mere idea of love only reminds the speaker that this well’s waters are currently silent and hidden away. With no outlet, those fond feelings and the speaker's capacity to love become useless.

  The poem’s final lesson, then, is perhaps that nothing can bring magical comfort when faced with the loss of love. Pleasant memories and the assurance that one will love again both turn out to be poor comfort. They serve, instead, only to compound the pain.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Complaint”

• Line 1

  There is a change—and I am poor;

  In two short, declarative statements, the speaker sets the tone for the rest of the poem. Something has "change[d]," and not for the better! Whatever this change is, it's left the speaker "poor."

  These quick, clipped phrases, separated by a clear caesura in the middle of the line (in form of a dash), are at once straightforward and filled with distress. The end-stop here also adds a sense of finality—there's no arguing with the speaker's point. The speaker seems to be simply relaying the facts, but also rather agitated or confused.

  On their own, this pair of statements is also vague, and the relationship between "change" and being "poor" remains ambiguous for the moment. It's also not yet clear whether the speaker is literally, financially poor, or poor in the sense of being deprived of something. The line thus works as a kind of hook, inviting readers to continue on if they wish to discover the exact nature of the speaker's plight.

  This line also introduces the poem's meter of iambic tetrameter, meaning it has four iambs (poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern):

  There is | a change | —and I | am poor;

  This steady meter will continue throughout the poem.

• Lines 2-4

  Your love hath been, nor long ago,
  A fountain at my fond heart's door,
  Whose only business was to flow;

  

  

• Lines 5-6

  And flow it did; not taking heed
  Of its own bounty, or my need.

  

  

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• Lines 7-8

  What happy moments did I count!
  Blest was I then all bliss above!

  

  

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• Lines 9-12

  Now, for that consecrated fount
  Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
  What have I? shall I dare to tell?
  A comfortless and hidden well.

  

  

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• Lines 13-16

  A well of love—it may be deep—
  I trust it is,—and never dry:
  What matter? if the waters sleep
  In silence and obscurity.

  

  

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• Lines 17-18

  —Such change, and at the very door
  Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

  

  

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“A Complaint” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Extended Metaphor

  Throughout "A Complaint," the speaker uses an extended metaphor to explore and explain feelings of loss. This metaphor compares the love that the speaker's relationship once offered to a richly flowing fountain, which becomes stagnant and still upon that love's loss. In this way, the metaphor helps readers visualize the "change" that the speaker mentions in line 1—that is, the difference between life during and after this relationship.

  In stanza 1, the metaphor presents the beloved's love as a nourishing and life-enriching force, bringing the speaker a "bounty." It presents this love as abundant, unconditional, and freely given: the fountain's "only business was to flow," the speaker says, and the wealth it brought was beyond the speaker's "need."

  The meaning of the metaphor shifts slightly, however, as it is developed in stanza 2. The speaker notes that, with the end of the relationship, the fountain is no longer full of "murmuring, sparkling, living" waters, and instead is now a "comfortless and hidden well." Rather than a metaphor for the relationship, then, this fountain-turned-into-a-"hidden"-well is more a metaphor for the speaker's emotional state before and after the end of this relationship.

  The metaphor continues to reflect the speaker's emotional state in stanza 3. Though the speaker hasn't lost everything (the speaker still has a "well of love"), the speaker also knows that the waters of love "sleep" and are relatively inactive. It seems that the speaker can't help but continually compare the present, with its lesser love, to the great love that used to be.

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• Juxtaposition

  

  
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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Rhetorical Question

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

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• Caesura

  

  

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• Asyndeton

  

  

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• Personification

  

  

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"A Complaint" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Taking Heed
• Complaint
• Change
• Fond
• Bounty
• Consecrated
• Obscurity

• Taking notice of/expressing concern for.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Complaint”

• Form

  "A Complaint" is made up of three stanzas of six lines each (a.k.a. three sestets). The division into three helps to organize the speaker's emotional journey:

  1. The first stanza is largely about memories of the great, nourishing love that the relationship once offered.
  2. The second stanza acts as a transition that shifts the focus from these blissful memories to the speaker's present circumstances.
  3. The third stanza continues to focus on the speaker's current emotional state and compounding feelings of despair.

  In this way, the three-part structure of the poem itself reflects its thematic point about how happy memories can only cause someone to feel only more painfully a lack of love in the present.

  Readers can also think of each stanza being further broken into a quatrain followed by a couplet, based on the patterns of rhyme sounds. We'll discuss that more in the Rhyme Scheme section of this guide.

• Meter

  The overarching meter of the poem is iambic tetrameter. That means each line has eight syllables, broken up into four iambs—poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern (da-DUM).

  Overall, the poem's use of this meter is fairly regular. Take the first line of the poem, for example:

  There is | a change— | and I | am poor;

  Most of the poem falls into this steady pattern, which grants it the predictable rhythm of a heartbeat. That said, there are a few moments in the poem when the speaker changes things up in a meaningful way. Line 3 is a good example:

  A foun- | tain at | my fond | heart's door,

  There are still eight syllables here, but there are more than four stressed beats. Though it's possible to scan "heart's" as being an unstressed syllable (or, when reciting the poem out loud, to pronounce it softly), the three words "fond," "hearts'," and "door" each seem to have enough importance that a reader may want to stress them. The point of this triple stress, at just this moment, may be to give added weight to the intimacy of the relationship described by the speaker.

  Another interesting variation comes in line 9:

  Now, for | that con- | secra- | ted fount

  Beginning the line with a stressed beat followed by an unstressed beat creates a foot known as a trochee. This is one of the most common inversions of iambic meter in English poetry, so the meter is still fairly conventional here. Yet it's still worth noting how the trochee calls attention to the word "Now," and in doing so signals the speaker's return to focus on the present. The inversion also slows the poem's rhythm, making readers feel the speaker's heaviness and deepening despair.

• Rhyme Scheme

  Each stanza of the poem follows the rhyme scheme:

  ABABCC

  Each six-line stanza can thus be broken into an opening quatrain with an alternating rhyme pattern, followed by a quick rhyming couplet (two rhymes in a row). This is one of the most common rhyme schemes for six-line stanzas in English poetry, and this pattern has several interesting effects.

  In general, the first four lines of each stanza, with their alternating ABAB rhymes, are used to advance a dynamic development around a theme or idea. The rhyming couplet then responds in some way to that theme/idea; the change in rhyme sound noticeably sets the final lines of each stanza apart from the rest, as in lines 11-12:

  What have I? shall I dare to tell?
  A comfortless and hidden well.

  After the exclamatory passages and turmoil of lines 7-10, the rhyme here settles readers in to the speaker's sense of resignation.

  It's also worth noting that the rhymes here are full and clear. The only half or slant rhyme is that of "obscurity" with "dry" in stanza 3, which adds to the sense of letdown as the speaker, again, becomes resigned to having lost this great love.

“A Complaint” Speaker

• The speaker of the poem is someone whose close relationship with a friend or a lover has recently come to an end, and who feels "poor" as a result. The speaker's perspective is that of someone looking back fondly on the past, seemingly unable to stop reliving, through memories, the precious love that used to be.

  The exact identity of the speaker is unclear beyond this, with no gender, age, nor occupation given in the poem. It has been argued that the speaker is in fact Wordsworth himself, and that he wrote this poem after his falling out with his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  The poem, however, is vague enough that this isn't necessarily the case, and the speaker's pain might resonate with anyone who has experienced heartbreak. Readers simply know that the speaker is also an introspective person, who is sensitive to the effect that the end of this relationship has had on them emotionally. But the speaker ultimately develops little if at all throughout the poem, as it ends with the speaker still unable to overcome their grief.

“A Complaint” Setting

• The poem takes place not "long" after the end of the speaker's relationship, when the speaker's pain still feels remarkably fresh and raw. Beyond this vague sense of time, however, the poem has no specific setting, taking place instead entirely within the speaker's mind and memories. The poem goes from focusing on the speaker's blissful past in stanza 1 and the first half of stanza 2 to focusing on the speaker's feelings of loss in the present at the end of stanza 2 and in stanza 3.

  The lack of broader setting makes the speaker's pain feel all the more endless; readers don't know how much time has actually passed, and thus don't know how long the speaker has been dwelling on this relationship—nor how long the speaker will continue to do so.

Literary and Historical Context of “A Complaint”

• Literary Context

  William Wordsworth first published "A Complaint" in his collection Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. The Romantic movement in British poetry was by then in full swing, and, in many ways, this poem is typical of the era.

  For example, though it may sound somewhat fancy to modern readers, "A Complaint" actually uses relatively ordinary, straightforward language for its time period. The Romantic movement was in part a reaction to the Neoclassical tendencies of earlier 18th-century poetry, which typically focused on high-brow, elitist subjects and used highly sophisticated language that only a select few could understand. The Romantics, by contrast, sought to capture the diction and rhythms of common speech—or, as Wordsworth himself puts it in his landmark collection Lyrical Ballads, "the language really used by men."

  Romantic poetry was also influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who helped to inspire the French Revolution, and Romantics tended to emphasize the individual and the inner life of the mind. And whereas the earlier Enlightenment/Age of Reason emphasized rationality, objectivity, and scientific understanding, Romantics put a premium on intuition, spontaneity, personal expression, inspiration, and emotional exploration.

  As a deeply introspective poem focused on the landscape of the speaker's inner world, "A Complaint" fits right in with many Romantic ideals. One difference worth noting, however, is that the speaker in a typical Romantic poem, after presenting a problem or situation, will typically end with a resolution, or having come away with some kind of epiphany or insight. Somewhat unconventionally for a Romantic poem, then, "A Complaint" ends simply by circling back to its problem, perhaps the better to emphasize the cyclical nature of the speaker's grief.

  Finally, as the poem's title suggests, "A Complaint" more broadly belongs to a genre of poetry called complaints, or plaints, which don't have a specific form but always grapple with unrequited love or misfortune.

  Historical Context

  Broadly speaking, Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States, which saw the development of large-scale industry and population growth in cities. In this era of rapid growth and urbanization, Romantic literature and art attempted to assert the virtues of quiet contemplation and introspection.

  There is, moreover, a deeply personal context that is usually assumed to have informed the poem's creation. "A Complaint" is often taken as being about Wordsworth's personal falling out with his friend and fellow Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he published the influential collection Lyrical Ballads in 1789. Together regarded as pioneers of the British Romantic movement, Wordsworth and Coleridge were close collaborators, with Wordsworth even becoming something of a mentor figure for the younger Coleridge.

  Tensions, however, quickly developed between the two men after Coleridge developed both an addiction to opium and an unrequited love for Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law. The situation worsened after Coleridge spent a Christmas with the Wordsworths in December 1806, during which his behavior became increasingly erratic and unstable.

  Over the next two years, Coleridge would move away from England, hopeful that a change of scene would be good for his health. In "A Complaint," according to some scholars, Wordsworth laments both his physical and emotional distance from his old friend.

More “A Complaint” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a recording of "A Complaint." 

  • Biography of William Wordsworth — Find out more about William Wordsworth, the man and the poet, through the Poetry Foundation. 

  • Coleridge and Wordsworth — Learn more about Coleridge's infatuation with Sara Hutchinson and his falling out with Wordsworth after the eventful Christmas of 1806. 

  • British Romanticism — Find out more about the roots and central tenets of the British Romantic movement.

  • Complaints — Learn about the widespread genre of "complaint" via this article on the Encyclopædia Britannica. 

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth

  • A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

  • Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

  • Expostulation and Reply

  • Extract from The Prelude (Boat Stealing)

  • It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

  • I Travelled Among Unknown Men

  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

  • Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

  • Lines Written in Early Spring

  • London, 1802

  • Mutability

  • My Heart Leaps Up

  • Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

  • She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

  • She was a Phantom of Delight

  • Strange fits of passion have I known

  • Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  • The Solitary Reaper

  • The Tables Turned

  • The World Is Too Much With Us

  • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower

  • To a Snowdrop

  • We Are Seven