As a poet of trauma, William Wordsworth is faced with the dilemma of having to find a way to voice traumatic muteness without disrupting silence. “The Thorn” exemplifies the difficulty of acquiring such a poetic voice by portraying a narrator who fails to read, let alone transmit, Martha’s traumatic suffering. The narrator’s failure is bound both to his sense of self that privileges emotional autonomy and transparent knowledge and to the arbitrariness of language itself. Against the backdrop of the failed narrator of “The Thorn,” emerges nature as a force that tempers the very desire of making alterity transparently known and available to the subject’s meaning-making process. Instead of transforming traumatic experience into a communicable form of knowledge, nature lets the noncommunicable aspects of human experience be, momentarily liberating the human mind from the burden of signification. Ultimately, nature in “The Thorn” disciplines the human mind so that it can turn back on habits of thought and easy categorization to discover the unassimilable otherness and inscrutability inherent in both human and non-human worlds. “The Thorn” seeks to show that the successful transmission of trauma is possible only through cutting the experience free from the subject of experience or at least from the familiar forms of subjectivity that require individuation as the condition for their existence. In other words, the grief and loss of Martha must not be experienced as merely subjective, consciously owned and recognized. Instead, the poem seeks to foster affective discomfort and cognitive unease to disturb the very notion of subjectivity itself. The affective interruption of the subject moves readers out of familiar forms of personhood so that the prohibition of mourning imposed on Martha can be ultimately lifted.
