Her Eyes Are Wild

I

Her eyes are wild, her head is bare,
The sun has burnt her coal-black hair;
Her eyebrows have a rusty stain,
And she came far from over the main.
She has a baby on her arm,
Or else she were alone:
And underneath the hay-stack warm,
And on the greenwood stone,
She talked and sung the woods among,
And it was in the English tongue.

II

"Sweet babe! they say that I am mad,
But nay, my heart is far too glad;
And I am happy when I sing
Full many a sad and doleful thing:
Then, lovely baby, do not fear!
I pray thee have no fear of me;
But safe as in a cradle, here,
My lovely baby! thou shalt be:
To thee I know too much I owe;
I cannot work thee any woe.

III

"A fire was once within my brain;
And in my head a dull, dull pain;
And fiendish faces, one, two, three,
Hung at my breast, and pulled at me;
But then there came a sight of joy;
It came at once to do me good;
I waked, and saw my little boy,
My little boy of flesh and blood;
Oh joy for me that sight to see!
For he was here, and only he.

IV

"Suck, little babe, oh suck again!
It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
Thy lips I feel them, baby! they
Draw from my heart the pain away.
Oh! press me with thy little hand;
It loosens something at my chest;
About that tight and deadly band
I feel thy little fingers prest.
The breeze I see is in the tree:
It comes to cool my babe and me.

V

"Oh! love me, love me, little boy!
Thou art thy mother's only joy;
And do not dread the waves below,
When o'er the sea-rock's edge we go;
The high crag cannot work me harm,
Nor leaping torrents when they howl;
The babe I carry on my arm,
He saves for me my precious soul;
Then happy lie; for blest am I;
Without me my sweet babe would die.

VI

"Then do not fear, my boy! for thee
Bold as a lion will I be;
And I will always be thy guide,
Through hollow snows and rivers wide.
I'll build an Indian bower; I know
The leaves that make the softest bed:
And, if from me thou wilt not go,
But still be true till I am dead,
My pretty thing! then thou shalt sing
As merry as the birds in spring.

VII

"Thy father cares not for my breast,
'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;
'Tis all thine own!--and, if its hue
Be changed, that was so fair to view,
'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!
My beauty, little child, is flown,
But thou wilt live with me in love,
And what if my poor cheek be brown?
'Tis well for me, thou canst not see
How pale and wan it else would be.

VIII

"Dread not their taunts, my little Life;
I am thy father's wedded wife;
And underneath the spreading tree
We two will live in honesty.
If his sweet boy he could forsake,
With me he never would have stayed:
From him no harm my babe can take;
But he, poor man! is wretched made;
And every day we two will pray
For him that's gone and far away.

IX

"I'll teach my boy the sweetest things:
I'll teach him how the owlet sings.
My little babe! thy lips are still,
And thou hast almost sucked thy fill.
--Where art thou gone, my own dear child?
What wicked looks are those I see?
Alas! alas! that look so wild,
It never, never came from me:
If thou art mad, my pretty lad,
Then I must be for ever sad.

X

"Oh! smile on me, my little lamb!
For I thy own dear mother am:
My love for thee has well been tried:
I've sought thy father far and wide.
I know the poisons of the shade;
I know the earth-nuts fit for food:
Then, pretty dear, be not afraid:
We'll find thy father in the wood.
Now laugh and be gay, to the woods away!
And there, my babe, we'll live for aye.

Background and Analysis of This Poem

William Wordsworth's Her Eyes Are Wild is more widely known under its earlier title, The Mad Mother. It was first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, the landmark collection by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that helped shape English Romantic poetry. Project Gutenberg's edition of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads preserves the poem under the title The Mad Mother, while later editions often print it by its opening line. That shift in title is worth noticing. "The Mad Mother" frames the woman through an outside judgement, while "Her Eyes Are Wild" draws us first to the intense, visible sign of her suffering.

The poem presents a distressed mother wandering with her baby, speaking and singing to the child in a language the narrator identifies as English. From the outside, she appears dishevelled, exposed and socially displaced. Her bare head, sun-burnt hair and desperate manner make her an object of public curiosity, perhaps even alarm. Yet Wordsworth's real effort is to move the reader beyond that first external view. The poem gradually lets the woman's own voice take over, and once it does, the scene becomes far more intimate. She is no longer merely a figure seen from a distance. She becomes someone whose grief, fear and love must be heard.

That movement from observation to voice is central to the poem's moral purpose. Wordsworth was deeply interested in people who would usually be overlooked, pitied cheaply or dismissed: beggars, vagrants, children, discharged soldiers, abandoned women and the rural poor. In the famous 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, he argued that poetry should draw from "incidents and situations from common life", using language closer to ordinary feeling than artificial poetic diction. The Poetry Foundation gives a helpful introduction to this revolutionary aspect of Wordsworth's poetic project. In Her Eyes Are Wild, he gives serious lyric attention to a woman whom polite society might prefer not to understand.

The mother's speech is full of love, anxiety and strange reassurance. She clings to the child as the one being that keeps her from being entirely alone. Again and again, the poem suggests that her baby is both comfort and burden, salvation and vulnerability. She imagines feeding him, protecting him and carrying him away from harm, yet her language also reveals how fragile her own hold on safety has become. Wordsworth's sympathy lies in recognising that maternal love does not disappear under mental distress. If anything, it becomes more urgent, more fearful and more painfully exposed.

Modern readers may pause over the poem's older language of madness. The word can feel blunt, even cruel, especially when applied to a vulnerable woman whose suffering likely involves poverty, abandonment, trauma or social exclusion as much as illness. Yet Wordsworth's poem is more compassionate than its old title may suggest. He does not use the woman simply as a sensational spectacle. Instead, he asks readers to stay with her voice long enough to feel the humanity inside her disturbance. The poem becomes an early Romantic attempt to see beneath social labels and attend to the sorrow they conceal.

For contemporary readers, Her Eyes Are Wild remains moving because it refuses to separate love from distress. The mother is frightened, unstable and marginalised, but she is also fiercely attached to her child. Wordsworth's achievement is not that he explains her fully, because he does not. It is that he refuses to let her be reduced to a type. Her wild eyes may be the first thing noticed, but they are not the whole of her. Behind them is a person carrying a child, a history, a wound, and a desperate song that still asks to be heard.