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to the fore as such high-frequency words as “solitude”, “nature”, “ethics”, “villages” and the like, pervade Wordsworthian lines, even from his early poetry on. In fact, Wordsworth’s continual attention to strangers is in tandem with his nonstop contemplation of community building, ever touching and ever enduring.  

2.1.1 The Poor Snubbed as Strangers

Who makes up the majority of the strangers depicted by Wordsworth? The answer would be the marginalized poor in abject conditions. Wordsworth certainly was not the first one to depict such people; nor was he the quickest to respond to the urgency of communication changes raised by the question of strangers. But he became the first important Romantic poet, if not the only one, to fix his eyes on the poor snubbed as strangers. 

Even a brief glimpse into the Wordsworthian strangers of Lyrical Ballads would reveal many of the poverty-stricken caught in the tormenting plights: “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman”, the “poorest of the poor”, is so feeble that even “at the root of the old tree / He might have worked for ever” to cut it (228-230); the starving shepherd should “weep in the public roads” to see all his sheep lost until what he could only retain “The Last of the Flock” (194-195); Martha Ray, a “wretched woman” in “The Thorn”, suspected of killing her own baby, roamed as an untouchable outsider to the villagers (246); in “The Brothers”, having been separated from each other by extreme poverty, the elder brother returned home as “the Stranger” to the local priest, while the younger “dead, and with mangled limbs” (209-221) … 

2.2 Love of Strangers Leading to Love of Men

There is, to begin with, a detail scarcely noticed in the critical sphere of The Prelude: in Book Eight, after claiming that his affections are led by nature “to partake / Love for the human creature’s absolute self”, Wordsworth does not focus on any “kindred, friends, and playmates”, but on strangers instead: 

That noticeable kindliness of heart  Sprang out of fountains, there abounding most, Where sovereign Nature dictated the tasks And occupations which her beauty adorned.  And shepherds were the men that pleased me first… (The Prelude  829) 

The word “shepherds” in these lines refers to strangers, for the poet-speaker has never seen them before. In other words, they are unknown to the poet-speaker until the very moment when “they pleased me”. This is very significant indeed: it tells us that the sight of those labouring people pleases him although he does not know them at all, which means that he has love of what can be called “brotherly love”. Qin Liyan has pointed out that “unlike Confucians, whose love of the world starts with the love of their own families, Wordsworth’s brotherly love starts with his sincere concern for the miserable shepherds” (30). Indeed, it is true that neither his beloved family, including his mother, sister and wife, nor such beloved friends as Coleridge, Raisley Calvert and the like appear in Book Eight11. This observation made by Qin is praiseworthy, but she has only touched briefly on the emergence of strangers without elaborating on their vital role, and therefore failed to pinpoint the kernel embedded in the image of strangers.

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