The poem was composed in 1800, and published in the second volume of the
_Lyrical Ballads_ in the same year. "Written at the Town-end, Grasmere,
about the same time as _The Brothers_. The Sheep-fold, on which so much
of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and
circumstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many
years before, the house we lived in at Town-end, along with some fields
and woodlands on the eastern shore of Grasmere. The name of the Evening
Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side
of the valley, more to the north."
In a letter to Charles James Fox the poet says: "In the two poems, _The
Brothers_ and _Michael_, I have attempted to draw a picture of the
domestic affections, as I know they exist among a class of men who are
now almost confined to the north of England. They are small independent
_proprietors_ of land, here called 'statesmen' [i.e., estates-men], men
of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties. . .
Their little tract of land serves as a kind of rallying point for their
domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes
them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise
be forgotten. The two poems that I have mentioned were written to show
that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."
Edward Fulton in a _A Selection of the Shorter Poems of Wordsworth_
(Macmillan) says: "The reason Wordsworth succeeds best in describing the
type of character portrayed in _Michael_ and _The Brothers_ is, of
course, chiefly because he knew that type best; but the fact that it was
the type for which he himself might have stood as the representative was
not without its effect upon him. His ideal man is but a variation of
himself. As Dean Church puts it: 'The ideal man with Wordsworth is the
hard-headed, frugal, unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his
strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet and beautiful home;
and this dalesman, built up by communion with nature and by meditation
into the poet-philosopher, with his serious faith and his never-failing
spring of enjoyment, is himself.' Types of character wholly alien to his
own have little attraction for him. He is content to look into the
depths of his own heart and to represent what he sees there. His field
of vision, therefore, is a very limited one: it takes in only a few
types. It is _man_, in fact, rather than men, that interests him."
The poem _Michael_ is well adapted to show Wordsworth's powers of
realism. He describes the poem as "a pastoral," which at once induces a
comparison, greatly to Wordsworth's advantage, with the pseudo-pastorals
of the age of Pope. There the shepherds and shepherdesses were scarcely
the pale shadows of reality, while Wordsworth's poem never swerves from
the line of truth. "The poet," as Sir Henry Taylor says with reference
to _Michael_, "writes in his confidence to impart interest to the
realities of life, deriving both the confidence and the power from the
deep interest which he feels in them. It is an attribute of unusual
susceptibility of imagination to need no extraordinary provocatives; and
when this is combined with intensity of observation and peculiarity of
language, it is the high privilege of the poet so endowed to rest upon
the common realities of life and to dispense with its anomalies." The
student should therefore be careful to observe (1) the truth of
description, and the appropriateness of the description to the
characters; (2) the strong and accurate delineation of the characters
themselves. Not only is this to be noted in the passages where the poet
has taken pains openly to portray their various characteristics, but
there are many passages, or single lines perhaps, which serve more subtly
to delineate them. What proud reserve, what sorrow painfully restrained,
the following line, for example, contains: "Two evenings after he had
heard the news."