She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways
BY W ILLIAM W ORDSW ORTH
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! - part of the grouping called the Lucy poems, shows a wealth of emotions. The Lucy poems tell...of an uneasy courtship, blissful domestic life, and abrupt and devastating loss
-The poem is very simple. It consists of three short stanzas. The first two stanzas focus on Lucy while she is still alive, and the last stanza tells the reader of Lucy's death and the poet's response to it. In these short stanzas, the poet tells of his admiration and singular devotion to Lucy and his utter despair over her death. Using simple diction, the poem's words take on even more meaning. His simple, economical stanzas of four lines each with every second line (abab) rhyming give the poem simplicity, like the subject itself. The poem used the typical ballad meter of iambic stressed/unstressed, in which the first and third lines typically have four stresses, and the second and fourth have three stresses. Even his words mostly consist of one syllable, signifying the simple, country life of his subject. The simplicity and sparseness of this poem capture Lucy's beauty all the more. The untouched and remote location the setting itself as well as the woman help to produce the romantic feel of this poem. In fact, being a romantic himself, Wordsworth would have been more attracted to her because of her seclusion from the rest of the world and her presence in nature. - In the first stanza, the reader learns that Lucy comes from the country by the river Dove, and that she was virtually unnoticed there. - In the second stanza, Wordsworth's aim is to show her innocence and beauty again. He uses two simple metaphors to emphasize these qualities. "A violet by a mossy stone" and "Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky." Diction is also used here to create impact. -In the third stanza, Wordsworth tells the reader of Lucy's death. He doesn't just say she died. He says, "She ceased to be," which creates greater impact with the typical expectancy of an infinitive. Again, the diction of anonymity is shown in that she lived "unknown" and "few could know."
Metaphors , Alliteration ( "half-hidden."), Sibilance ( "as a star" and "sky.") serves to emphasize the
remoteness of the subject and the poem itself, Assonance ( "Dove, " "none," "love," "mossy stone")
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (William Wordsworth, 1798)
A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earths diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.
-Lucy poems, a cluster of elegies about the death of a young girl.
- a ballad, though a very short one. The stanzas follow an abab rhyme scheme, and the first and third lines are in iambic tetrameter, while the second and forth lines are in iambic trimeter. - The poem is comprised of only two four-line stanzas, and yet a great deal happens in this narrow space. We see the speaker's realization not only that this young woman has died, but also that bad things can happen in a beautiful world. In the first stanza the speaker is innocently unaware that age can touch the woman, but he is quickly taught a harsh lesson when she dies between stanzas one and two. The choice to hide the death between the stanzas is interesting, as it seems to imply that the speaker is unable to verbalize the pain that goes along with the sudden loss.
- The choice of words (slumber rather than sleep), syntactic inversion (my spirit seal rather than seal my spirit) and the strong sound-patterning all put us in the realm of heightened poetic language, but at its simplest the poet fell asleep and wasnt frightened. - the point where the study guides lead us astray: She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years. - Its still considered impolite to refer to someone as she in conversation without first establishing who she is, hence the conventional Whos she? the cats mother?. She is a pronoun. - the natural parsing of English syntax would lead us to associate she with my spirit and it would make sense. We should remember that the spirit was conventionally gendered as female (every classically-educated 18th century poet would have known that Psyche was a woman), and it would have killed the poem dead to have used it. - Whats being described here is a mystical experience. The speaker of the poem falls into some sort of sleep or trance-state and experiences a sense of liberation from time (could not feel / The touch of earthly years) and unity with inert nature. - In the last two lines the speaker describes the young woman trapped beneath the
surface of the earth. In fact, she has become a part of the earth, rolling with it as it turns day to day. The very last line of the poem is especially interesting, because the speaker lists both rocks and stones, which are essentially the same. It may be that he intends to reference both gravestones and common rocks. Alternatively, the speaker may intend to emphasize the "dead" things of the earth over living things like trees
