By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Tables Turned’ is a poem from the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, a book co-authored by the two English Romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. ‘The Tables Turned’ is one of Wordsworth’s poems from the collection. In many ways, the poem should be viewed as a companion-piece to the poem which precedes it in Lyrical Ballads: ‘Expostulation and Reply’. Both poems are thought to have been composed at the same time, on or around 23 May 1798.