perplexedness

Granted, it's not the first time this has happened, but it certainly is the most acutely felt perplexedness to date.

As in many poems by Young himself, perplexedness is a central stance of this style--the charming, picaresque speaker who staggers through the world, mucking up his own enterprises, while also making discoveries about human life.

Langland is not interested in indulging such yearnings, rather insisting on the perplexedness of moral endeavour, and moving remorselessly away from points of achieved moral vision in the poem to plunge the reader (and, one suspects, the writer too) once again into the uncertainties of moral exploration--and in these processes the poem enacts in an aesthetic realm the obligations of moral living in the world outside the poem.