B. Wordsworth

rite

(n.) a ceremony; the customary form of a ceremony; any formal custom or practice

distill

(v) purify; extract the essential elements of

how many lines does he write a month?

1 line

Savannah

200 acre park in the center of Port-of-Spain. the race course is located there

how many beggars called everyday at the hospital houses in Miguel street?

3

how much was he trying to sell the poem for?

4 cents

how many years altogether?

5 + (estimate) 22

constellation

A group of stars that form a pattern in the sky

4:00

B. Wordsworth

Plot and story line

B. Wordsworth' is a short story written by V.S. Naipaul in 1959. The narrator tells the story of his relationship with a poet named B. Wordsworth when he (narrator) was a little boy. The story starts with the description of beggars visiting houses trying to earn some money or alms in the kind houses of Miguel street. A tidily dressed man knocks on a house where our little narrator lives with his mother. When the narrator asks the reason, the man replies that he wants to see the bees in their compound. The narrator runs upstairs and tells his mother that a man wants to see the bees. His mother comes and asks the man in an unfriendly manner about what he actually wants. The man again says that he wants to see the bees. The man's English is so good that the mother suspects him but nevertheless she agrees to let him in the yard. The boy (narrator) and the man watch the bees together. The man says that he likes watching the bees and asks the kid if he likes it as well. The kid replies that he never has the time to. The man shakes his head sadly and says that's what he does; he watches. The boy, quizzical about the peculiar man, asks various questions. The man introduces himself as Black Wordsworth. He then says that he can watch a flower like the morning glory and cry. The kid asks what he cries for. B. Wordsworth replies "when you're a poet you can cry for everything". After this Wordsworth asks the child if he likes his mother. The kid says only when she's not beating him. Wordsworth pulls out a printed paper from his pocket. He tells the kid that on this paper the greatest poem about mothers is written and he'd sell it to him for 4 cents if he likes. The kid rushes up to his mother to ask if she'd buy it but his mother declines. The kid goes back to the man and tells him that his mother doesn't have four cents. Wordsworth isn't bothered by this. The kid asks why he goes around like this and whether he is able to earn enough this way. Wordsworth says that this way he meets new people. He also expects to meet new poets. But not a single copy has been sold till now. After Wordsworth leaves the kid wishes that they meet again. After one week, while the boy is returning from school, they run into each other. Wordsworth admits that he too was hoping to see him again. He tells the kid that he has the best mango trees in his yard and wants to invite him to eat them. He lives in Alberto Street in a one-room hut. After the kid has had enough mangoes, he returns home. His mother goes berserk upon seeing his shirt stained with yellow juice. His mother beats him badly that day. In anger the kid leaves home screaming he'll never come back. He goes to Wordsworth's place. Seeing the boy's bleeding nose, Wordsworth consoles him and suggests that if he stops crying, they will go for a walk. They go for a walk down to Savannah and walks to the race-course. They lie on the green grass. Wordsworth asks the kid to look up at the stars and think how far they are from them. The kid does so. Never in his life had he felt so great yet nothing. After this, some light flashes on their faces; a policeman comes up to them, asking what they are doing. Wordsworth replies that he has been asking the same question to himself for 40 years. Wordsworth makes the kid promise that he'd never tell anyone about him or the mango trees. The boy keeps his promise. One day the boy goes to meet B. Wordsworth and sees him lying on his sofa, severely ill. Death is written clear on his face. Heartbroken, the boy goes up to him. Wordsworth sits up, placing the boy on his knees, and says that he is going to tell a joke. Then B. Wordsworth says that everything he has ever told the boy about himself was a lie. He also makes the kid promise that he'll never come back again. Then the kid leaves. After one year, while the boy was crossing the same street, there was no sign of Wordsworth's one-room hut or his trees. It was as if Wordsworth had never existed.

V. S Naipaul

Born in Trinidad in the Caribbean

Why does B. Wordsworth ask the boy never to return?

Does not want the boy to witness his death

George's front room

George is a character in another story in Naipaul's book Miguel Street

In "B. Wordsworth," the boy's tears show that he

He learned to be a poet like Woodsworth

In the story, B. Wordsworth uses standard English. What does this indicate about him?

He may be from a higher social class or have been educated in British Schools

Provide evidence from the text to show that "B. Wordsworth" by V. S. Naipaul is a coming of age story of a little boy.

In V. S. Naipaul's short story "B. Wordsworth", the narrator tells us one of his experiences from his childhood days when he lived with his mother in Miguel Street in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The story draws on the author's own childhood memories. The narrator was a school boy when the events of the story occurred. This is apparent in the following conversation: I said, 'Why you does cry?' 'Why, boy? Why? You will know when you grow up. But the boy did not write his story immediately when or after the incident occurred. Rather he is a grown up author now writing his reminiscence. The story is set in the past. The narrator also shows us how immature a boy he was at the time of the story by emphasizing his imaginative and unsuspecting nature. When B. Wordsworth claimed that he was writing the greatest poem of the world, he believed it without a second thought. He even didn't find a cause to suspect whether B. Wordsworth was actually a poet or not though he never heard beyond the first line of his poem. When B. Wordsworth told the narrator that he (narrator) was a poet too, he didn't find a reason to laugh but was inclined to believe it. Now, as the boy has grown up to a man, he has gathered experiences, become more mature and even forgotten some details that are of no use. Clearly he is writing the story after many years of the original events: "I can spot Orion even today, but I have forgotten the rest.", he says of their star watching.

Story perspective

It's written in first person from the young boy's perspective

Author

The Nobel Prize for literature has gone to someone who deserves it. Like the great masters of the past, V.S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful. Simple, strong words, with which to express the humanity of all of us. Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of indentured labourers shipped from India, this dispossessed child of the Raj has come on a long and marvellous journey. His upbringing familiarised him with every sort of deprivation, material and cultural. A scholarship to Oxford brought him to this country. Nothing sustained him afterwards except the determination, often close to despair, to become a writer. Against all likelihood, a spirit of pure comedy flows through his early books. It is a saving grace. Footloose, he began to travel for long periods in India and Africa. It was at a time of decolonisation, when so many people the whole world over had to reassess their identity. Naipaul saw for himself the resulting turmoil of emotions, that collision of self-serving myth and guilt which make up today's bewildered world and prevents people from coming to terms with who they really are, and to know how to treat one another. On these travels he was exploring nothing less than the meaning of culture and history. Victimhood might have been his central theme, granted his background. Not at all. That same determination to be a writer also liberated him from self-pity. Each one of us, his books declare, can choose to be a free individual. It is a matter of will and choice, and above all intellect. Critics have sometimes argued that people - in the Third World especially - are trapped in their culture and history without possibility of choice, and can only be free if others make them so. To them, V.S. Naipaul's vision that they have to take responsibility for themselves can seem like some sort of First World privilege, and a conservative philosophy at that. Quite the contrary: the absolute rejection of victimhood is necessary if we are to meet as we must on an equal footing, and it is no exaggeration to say that he has shifted public opinion towards this understanding as no other writer has done. Courage and persistence were required to hold a belief quite so unfashionable in recent years, but it is this belief that has made Naipaul the universal writer and humanist that he is. The comic spirit is still present, though submerged in his later books beneath a darkening sense of tragedy. Naipaul has written about slavery, revolution, guerrillas, corrupt politicians, the poor and the oppressed, interpreting the rages so deeply rooted in our societies. Long before others, he began to report on the irrational frenzy loosed these past two decades by religion in the Islamic world from Iran to Indonesia and Pakistan. This phenomenon too was a retreat from history into self-serving myth. Self-pity possesses Islamic fundamentalists so absolutely that they are able to close out everything else. Yet Naipaul also observed with profound insight that even the most fanaticised among them know that the West will always be there setting the objective standards, and that they can do nothing about that. They are to be pitied for rage so helpless. In himself, Naipaul is a private man, who lives in the country in order to have the solitude for thinking and writing. Everything that has ever happened to him is pigeonholed with exactitude in his memory. Formidably well-read, he can quote books he read years ago, and all the conversations he has had. Melancholy grips him at the spectacle of "the steady grinding down of the old world" as he put it, and he might complain to an interviewer that he is living in a "plebeian culture that celebrates itself." Other writers born abroad have settled here and enriched our literature, but there has never been one like Naipaul. His personal story is moving; his achievement extraordinary. There is a great moral to his life's work, that the human comedy will come out all right because, when all is said and done, intellect is more powerful than vicissitude and wickedness. "B. W

"B. Wordsworth" is set in

Trinidad

author

V.S. Naipaul

calypsonians

West Indian folk musicians who traditionally perform satirical, syncopated songs that are improvised or composed on the spot. Calypso possibly comes from kaiso, a Trinidadian dialect word meaning "town crier"

"what do you want"

Your bees

dhoti

a garment worn by male Hindus, consisting of a piece of material tied around the waist and extending to cover most of the legs.

what took the place of his house

a two storied building with brick and concrete everywhere

botanical

adj. Connected with the study or cultivation of plants.

Themes

admiration, identity, curiosity, friendship, control, freedom, uncertainty and coming of age.

where did he live

alberto street in a one roomed hut

10:00

an indian came in a dhoti & white jacket, theyd give him rice

rogue

archaic for "wandering beggar"

what was his name?

b. wordsworth

"b" stands for

black wordsworth

2:00

blind men led by a boy called for his penny

"only_______ do that sort of thing"

calypsonians

b Wordsworth tells the boy that poets are people who

can cry for everything and anything

V.S. Naipaul

carribean novelist, born in trinidad

what kind of trees

coconut, mango, plum

congorees

conger eels; long, scaleless eels found in the warm waters of the West Indies

Orion the Hunter

constellation named for a hunter in Greek and Roman mythology whom Diana-the goddess of the moon and of hunting - loves but accidentally kills

b. Wordsworths request is different from those of others who come calling in the narrators neighborhood because it

doesn't involve a handout

what happened when he got home?

he got beat by his mom

how does black make money?

he sings calypsoes in the calypso season

why did he keep trying to sell it if no one bought one?

he wanted to meet good poets

what did the strange man do

he was a poet "the greatest in the world"

the narrators mother beats him because

he's spent a day with b Wordsworth

what happened to b.wordsworths family?

his wife died while pregnant

Characters

narrator: a boy, is unnamed in the story Poet: B. Wordsworth - B stands for Black Mother: who beats the narrator

12:00

old woman smoking a pipe, she'd get a cent

specific constellation

orion the hunter

when a policeman asks b Wordsworth what he is doing here, b wordsworths response suggests that he is

philosophical

who interrupted them

police officer

the pin

sank

Port of Spain, Trinidad

seaport on the island of Trinidad; capital of Trinidad and Tobago

b Wordsworth makes his living by

singing calypsos in the calypso season

gru-gru palm trees

spiny-trunked West Indian palm trees

b. Wordsworth explains his overgrown yard by

telling a love story

what was last months line?

the past is deep

Story set in

trinidad

the boys language in the story can best be described as

uneducated

what bees?

uninvited bees in the narrator's 4 gru-gru palm trees

patronize

v. to be a customer of

the narrators language as an adult suggests that he

was influenced by b wordsworth

at the end of his life, b Wordsworth says the story he told the narrator about the boy and girl poets

was untrue

b. wordsworth's brother

white wordsworth

when youre a poet,

you can cry for anything