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Commentary on "The Ballad of George and Susan"
This poignant, sensitive, faintly etherial, Shelleyan, methaphysical [sic
? ed.], occasionally even bathetic lyric evokes the line ?I fall upon the
thorns of life! I Bleed!? from ?Ode to the West Wind?. The humiliations
of the home office, the potato marketing board (The board, the board,
the potato marketing board) pierce the artistic soul of Augusta
Hector like barbed arrows, and we see here how she can only find true solace
by expressing her plight in verse (CH).