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A Derridean Analysis of Wordsworth’s Poem Michael

 By Peter Atkinson 31/05/2025

A Derridean analysis of William Wordsworth’s Michael (2020) reveals how the poem, while ostensibly a lament for lost rural purity and patriarchal continuity, is structured by the very instabilities and absences it seeks to overcome. The poem’s central narrative – the story of an aging shepherd’s failed attempt to secure his lineage through his son Luke – unfolds as a series of deferred meanings and traces that undermine its surface-level coherence.

Wordsworth presents nature as a stable, moral force, embodied in Michael’s deep connection to his land and the pastoral ideal, but this stability is unsettled by the poem’s reliance on language, which, as Derrida (1976) argues, is always already marked by différance – the endless deferral and differentiation of meaning. The pastoral harmony Michael strives to preserve is not an organic given but a construct mediated by economic necessity and linguistic performance, exposing the impossibility of pure presence. 

The sheepfold, the poem’s central symbol, functions as a Derridean trace – a sign that signifies absence rather than presence. Intended as a monument to familial continuity, it remains unfinished, a material reminder of Luke’s betrayal and Michael’s shattered hopes. Like all traces, it points to an origin that was never fully present, revealing the spectral nature of inheritance. Similarly, Michael’s spoken covenant with Luke, a speech act meant to bind meaning and ensure loyalty, fails precisely because language is inherently unstable (Bennington, 2021). The covenant, like writing, is subject to rupture, exposing the fragility of attempts to fix meaning through utterance. 

Wordsworth frames the poem as an oral tale preserved by a narrator, but this act of storytelling is itself a supplement, both adding to and displacing the “original” grief it seeks to convey. The narrator’s claim to faithfully recount Michael’s history is undermined by the gaps and silences in the narrative, demonstrating that language cannot fully capture the “history of a man’s heart.” The poem thus becomes a palimpsest, where layers of signification overlap without ever fully restoring the lost presence of Michael’s world. 

The city, often read as the corrupting antithesis to rural purity, functions in Derridean terms as a supplement—an addition that exposes the lack in what it seeks to oppose. Luke’s downfall in the urban sphere does not merely corrupt an idyllic past but reveals that the pastoral ideal was always already incomplete, dependent on external systems of money, law, and labour. The opposition between nature and culture deconstructs itself, showing that both are entangled in networks of difference and deferral. Michael’s land, for instance, is only “his” through legal contracts, rendering his supposed rootedness a mediated construct. 

Ultimately, Michael is not simply a lament for lost presence but a demonstration of how meaning is constituted through absence and trace. The sheepfold, the covenant, and even the poem itself are unstable signs that defer the unity they appear to promise. Like Freud’s (2003) mystic writing-pad, Wordsworth’s language inscribes and erases simultaneously, leaving behind only traces of an unrecoverable origin. The poem thus becomes a scene of writing in the Derridean sense, where the impossibility of full presence—whether in nature, memory, or language—is laid bare. What emerges is not a coherent narrative of loss, but a text haunted by the spectres of what never fully was, a testament to the irreducible différance that structures all signification.

References

Bennington, G. (2021) Not half no end: militant melancholia in Wordsworth and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Translated by G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny (D. McLintock, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1919).

Wordsworth, W. and Coleridge, S.T. (2020) Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802. Edited by F. Stafford. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

Reference for this article

Atkinson, P. (2025) A Derridean analysis of Wordsworth’s poem Michael. Available at: https://atkintekblog.com/derridean-analysis-of-michael/ (Accessed: date).