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The Lucy Poems are a sequence of five verses composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth between 1798 and 1799. The series was first printed in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, a volume of Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems that marked Wordsworth's first major achievement in poetry, and saw a climacteric in the English Romantic movement. The series concerns the poet's meditations on his unrequited love for the now dead Lucy. Although Lucy remains distant and faintly drawn in all the five poems, to Wordsworth she seems to represented "The joy of my desire", is "cherished", while the fact of her death the feelinga of melchanoly which permeates each line in the series. Finally, in "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal", Wordsworth concedes, "No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees".

Whether the character of Lucy was based on a historical or imagined figure has been a matter of prolonged debate amongst literary historians and critics. Some have speculated that the character represents Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, while others hold that she is an mearly idealised figure used by the poet as a device used by the poet to develop his thoughts and mediatations on loss, nature and idealised beauty.

Although today the Lucy Poems are considered to be amongst Wordsworth's best work, during his lifetime they did not exist as a sequence; it was only until the Victorian period that a connection was made and they were gathered together as a group by anthologists and critics.

Background

Wordsworth and Coleridge first published their "Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems" in 1798, in an act generally considered to herald the beginning of the Romantic movement in English literature. Wordsworth's aim when composing the poems was to arrive at a "selection of the language really spoken by men". The preface to the 1802 edition sets out this purpose,

The principle object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.

From October 1798 to February 1799, Wordsworth began writing the "Lucy" poems along with the "Matthew" poems, "Lucy Gray", The Prelude and other poems. During this time, Wordsworth was living at Goslar and was separated from Coleridge, which caused him to become depressed. The first three written Lucy poems ("Strange fits of passion", "She lived among the untrodden ways", and "A slumber did my spirit seal") were completed during the three months immediately following Wordsworth's separation from Coleridge. They first appeared in a letter from Wordsworth to Coleridge, in which Wordsworth wrote that "She dwelt among the untrodden Ways" and "Strange Fits of Passion I have known" were "little Rhyme poems which I hope will amuse you". Wordsworth thus characterized the two poems in such a way in order to mitigate any disappointment Coleridge may suffer in receiving these two poems instead of the promised The Recluse. The fourth Lucy poem ("Three years she grew in sun and shower") was written immediatly before Wordsworth was reunited with Coleridge. The final poem, ("I travelled among unknown men") was written two years later, before Wordsworth was to be again separated from Coleridge. Unlike the other poems, "I travelled among unknown Men" was sent to the poet's childhood friend and later wife, Mary Hutchinson, with a note that said it should be "read after She dwelt among".

Directions were given to the printer in 1802 to insert "I have travelled among unknown men" immediately following "A Slumber did my spirit seal", however it was omitted, but later published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.

While all the 'Lucy' poems imagine the death of the subject, she is not mentioned by name in "A Slumber did my spirit seal". The character of Lucy further appears in Worthworths "Lucy Gray" and his "The Glow-worm".

"poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."

The poems

Critics, not Wordsworth, organised the poems together as a complete set. The grouping of the five poems together as the "Lucy" series was initiated by Thomas Powell in 1831, and continued by the Scottish historical writer Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) in 1875. Golden Treasury (1891) complied by the English historian Francis Palgrave (1788–1861) groups all except for "Strange fits of passion I have know". They appear as a complete set in the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold's collection of Wordsworth's poems. Of the five works, only "A slumber did my spirit seal" fails to mention Lucy by name, and it is the critics, not Wordsworth explicitly, who includes is as part of a set. The series' organisation is further complicated by Wordsworth ommission of "I travell'd among unknown men" in the two subsequent editions of Lyrical Ballads.

If read together, the five "Lucy" poems describe deal with loss and gain and the temporary nature of life. If read by the organisation of the March 1815 edition, there is a lyric progression: the lover slowly learns about himself and the world, which is expressed in "A slumber did my spirit seal". The 1815 edition organises the poems into the "Poems Founded on the Affections" ("Strange fits of passion", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways", and "I travelled among unknown men") and "Poems of the Imagination" ("Three years she grew" and "A slumber did my spirit seal"). This organisation provides two dream based poems ("Strange fits of passion" and "A slumber did my spirit seal") that frame the whole series and represent two different experiences and highlight the development of the narrator. However, in terms of chronology, "I travelled among unknown men" was written last, and this poem serves as its own symbolic conclusion, emotionally and thematically, to the Lucy poems.

Other poems have been unsuccessfully proposed to be added to the list of "Lucy" poems or Lucy related poems. These include "Alcaeus to Sappho", "Among all lovely things", "Lucy Gray", "Surprised by joy", "Tis said, that some have died for love", "Louisa", "Nutting", "Presentiments", "She was a Phantom of delight", "The Danish Boy", "The Two April Mornings", "To a Young Lady", and "Written in Very Early Youth".

Strange fits of passion I have known

"Strange fits of passion..." was probably composed before the others in the series and is based around a fantasy of Lucy's death. The structure of the poem represents the narrator's mental ambivalence. It begins with a different tone from the other Lucy poems; the first stanza contrasts with the rest of the poem. The poem, as lyrical ballad, differs from the traditional ballad form that emphasises abnormal action and instead focuses on mood.

Death is explicitly described but is still mysterious. The moon operates as a symbol of the lover, but as to why the narrator is able to connect Lucy to the moon is complicated. The moon represents actions, and the narrator is fixated on the moon as he riders to the cottage, but this fixation is hypnotic. Both the narrator and the moon travel to Lucy. The fifth stanza reveals an overwhelming dream state and a supernatural power that controls the horse's motion, a motion which, according to Geoffrey Hartman, is a "motion approaching yet never quite attaining its end, and the horse advancing, as it were, apart from the rider, who is somewhere else".

When the moon finally drops behind the cottage, the narrator is brought back to consciousness and thinks of death. The narrator before this time was in a hypnotic/dream state, and when this ends the narrator becomes self-conscious again. The poem is a love poem, but the narrator is motivated by a greater need that is fulfilled by love and poetry. Lucy, as the beloved, is united with the landscape and is more than a person. The image of the moon represents how love causes a lover to be fixated on something beyond the beloved. However, there is a darker possibility that the dream state represents the fulfillment of the lover's fantasy through the death of the beloved. The lover falls asleep while approaching his beloved's home, which represents his unwillingness to be with Lucy.

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

"She Dwelt" describes Lucy as having lived in solitude near the source of the River Dove. In order to convey the dignity and unaffected flower-like naturalness of his subject, Wordsworth uses simple language, mainly words of one syllable. In the opening quatrain, he describes the isolated and untouched area where Lucy lived, while her innocence is explored in the second, during which her beauty is compared to that of a hidden flower. The final stanza laments Lucy's early and lonesome death, which only he alone notices.

According to the literary critic Kenneth Ober, the poem describes the "growth, perfection, and death" of Lucy. Whether Wordsworth has declared his love for her is unclear, and even whether she has been aware of his affection is left unsaid in the verse. However it is clear that the poet's feelings remain unrequited, and the final lines reveal that the object of his affections has died alone, and he passing has been largely unnoticed.

Lucy's "untrodden ways" are symbolic of both her physical isolation and the unknown details of her mind and life. In the poem, Wordsworth is concerned not so much with his observation of Lucy, but with his experience when reflecting on her passing. Throughout the poem sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, a fact emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses. The effectiveness the concluding line in the concluding stanza has divided critics and has variously been described as "a masterstroke of understatement" and overtly sentimental. Wordsworth's voice remains largely muted, and he was equally silent about the poem and series throughout his life. This fact was often mentioned by 19th century critics, however they disagreed of as to its value and significance. One critic, writing in 1851, remarked on the poem's "deep but subdued and silent devour."

The three quatrain "She dwelt" is written with an economy and spareness intended to capture the simplicity the poet sees in Lucy. Lucy's femininity is described in the verse in girlish terms, a fact that has drawn criticism from some critics that see a female icon, in the words of John Woolford "represented in Lucy by condemning her to death while denying her the actual or symbolic fulfillment of maternity". To evoke the "loveliness of body and spirit", a pair of complementary but opposite images are employed in the second stanza: a solitary violet, unseen and hidden, and Venus, emblem of love, and the first star of evening, public and visible to all. Wondering which Lucy most resembled—the violet or the star—the critic Cleanth Brooks concluded that although Wordsworth likely viewed her as "the single star, completely dominating world, not arrogantly like the sun, but sweetly and modestly". Brooks considered the metaphor only vaguely relevant, and a conventional and anomalous complement. For Wordsworth, Lucy's appeal is closer to the violet and lies in her seclusion, and her perceived affinity with nature.

Wordsworth acquired a copy of Thomas Percy's 1765 collection of British ballad material "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" in Hamburg a few months before he began to compose the Lucy series. The influence of traditional English folk ballad is evident in the meter, rhythm, and structure of the poem. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways follows the variant ballad stanza a4–b3–a4 b3, and in keeping with ballad tradition seeks to tell its story in a dramatic manner. As the critic Kenneth Ober observed, "To confuse the mode of the 'Lucy' poems with that of the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, a story is told as boldly and briefly as possible." Ober compares the opening lines of She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways to the traditional ballad Katharine Jaffray and notes the similarities in rhythm and structure, as well as in theme and imagery:

There livd a lass in yonder dale,
  And doun in yonder glen, O.
And Katherine Jaffray was her name,
  Well known by many men, O.

According to the critic Carl Woodring, "She Dwelt" can be read as an elegy. Woodring views the poem, and the Lucy series in general, as elegiac, "in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death", and that they have "the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology....if all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy poems are also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance".

One passage was originally intended for poem "Michael"— Renew'd their search begun where from Dove Crag / Ill home for bird so gentle / they look'd down / On Deep-dale Head, and Brothers-water..

I have travelled among unknown men

Three years she grew in sun and shower

"Three years she grew in sun and shower" was composed between 6 October and 28 December 1798. The plot describes the raising of Lucy by nature and her development. The poem presents a complex opposition of words and sentiments. There are many instances of antithetical couplings of words ('sun and shower', 'law and impulse' 'earth and heaven', 'kindle or restrain'), which are used as a device to convey the notion of opposing forces at work in nature. There is further conflict and opposition between nature and mankind, as both attempt to possess Lucy. Thus, the poem contains both epithalamium and elegiac characteristics; the marriage described is between Lucy and Nature, while her human lover (the poet) is left to mourn in the knowledge that death has separated from her from mankind, and she will forever now be with with nature.

Nature interrupts the voice of the poet after the first line and a half, in the words of the litraturely historian Susan Eilenberg, " the poets control over his poem...and not letting him speak again until it (nature) has destroyed its subject".

A slumber did my spirit steal

"Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph/whether it had any reality, I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die."'; In a copy sent to Poole, he gives 'Epitaph' as the title and 'Mov'd instead of 'Roll'd'.

While all of the Lucy poems imagine the death of the subject; she is not mentioned by name in "A Slumber did my spirit seal".

The poem consists of two stanza of four lines each. Both are characterised by the use of spare and economic language. The first is built upon an even, soporific movement in which figurative language conveys a dream like atmosphere used to convey of a vaguely described girl who "seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years." The second stanza of maintains the quite and even tone of the first, but serves to undo the sentiments of its predecessor as it revealed that Lucy has died and that the calmness of the first stanza represents, according to the critic Boris Ford, "the calmness of death". Wordsworth approaches the fact of the girl's death not with a sense of embitterment or emptiness, but instead takes consolation from the fact that she is now beyond life's trials, and "at last...in inanimate community with the earth's natural fixtures". The rocks and stones described in the final line are used to convey the poet's feeling towards the loss of a human life rendered inanimate.

In 1802, instructions were given to Wordsworth's printer to place 'I travell'd among unknown Men' immediately after "A Slumber did my spirit seal", but in the event was omitted, and only published later in 1807's "Poems, in Two Volumes".

Revisions

Wordsworth took care in editing and revising the "Lucy" poems.

The earliest edition of "Strange fits of passion" was sent to Coleridge by Dorothy in December 1798. The audience changes between the first version and later editions of the text by the addition of the first stanza which is lacking in the original. The first stanza, which claims that "I will dare to tell,/ But in the Lover's ear alone", makes it clear that only one under love's influence could understand the relationship between the moon, the beloved, and the the beloved's death. Besides the addition of a new stanza at the beginning of the poem, Wordsworth removed the original last stanza:

I told her this; her laughter light

Is ringing in my ears;

And when I think upon that night

My eyes are dim with tears.

This final stanza lost its importance with the completion of the other poems, and the revision of the poem allowed for a sense of anticipation to dominate the end of the poem and draw the audience into the story of the remaining "Lucy" poems. Of the other changes, only the description of the horse's movement is important, as "My horse trudg'd on" becomes "With quickening pace my horse drew nigh", which heightens the narrator's vulnerability to fantasies and dreams in the revised version.

Along with "Strange fits of passion" was a copy of "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" which had two stanzas deleted in the original edition. The revisions exclude many of the images, but emphasizes the grief that the narrator experiences. The original version begins with floral imagery, which was later minimalised:

My hope was one, from cities far,

Nursed on a lonesome heath;

Her lips were red as roses are,

Her hair a woodbine wreath.

The fourth stanza, later removed, includes an explanation of how Lucy was to die: "But slow distemper checked her bloom,/ And on the Heath she died."

Interpretation

Wordsworth wrote the "Lucy" poems between between October 1798 and April 1801 while he lived with his sister Dorothy in Hamburg, Germany.

The real life identity of Lucy has never been identified, and it is probable that she was not modeled on any one historical person. Wordsworth himself never addressed the matter of her origion, and was reticent about commenting on the series. Of the time he spend in Germany comparatively little record survives, although a great deal of record is known of the circumstances and details of his life in general. Only one known mention from the poet of the series survives, however it on the whole series only, and not any of the individual verses.

Separation from Coleridge

While writing the Lucy poems, Wordsworth struggled emotionally and mentally. In December 1798, he said in a letter to Coleridge:

As I have had no books I have been obliged to write in self-defence. I should have written five times as much as I have done but that I am prevented by an uneasiness at my stomach and side, with a dull pain about my heart. I have used the word pain, but uneasiness and heat are words which more accurately express my feelings. At all events it renders writing unpleasant. Reading is now become a kind of luxury to me. When I do not read I am absolutely consumed by thinking and feeling and bodily exertions of voice or of limbs, the consequence of those feelings.

Soon after, Dorothy wrote that she and William had, "put aside all the manuscript poems and it is agreed between us that I am not to give them up to him even if he asks for them". Wordsworth was attached to Coleridge because his life before they met (at Alfoxden, England pre-September 1798) was sedentary and dull, while his poetry to that point amounted to little. Coleridge acted as Wordsworth's muse, and Coleridge's praise and encouragement allowed Wordsworth to write prolifically. Dorothy described Wordsworth while around Coleridge when she wrote: "His faculties seem to expand every day, he composes with much more facility than he did". It was under Coleridge's support that Wordsworth was encouraged to write poetry intended to rival Milton. When Wordsworth was forced to move from Alfoxden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy agreed to travel to Germany in September 1798. Originally, Coleridge and Wordsworth lived together in Hamburg, but this did not last as they were given advice about moving to Ratzeburg, which Coleridge acted upon but Wordsworth was forced to decline over monetary issues; Wordsworth was unable to provide for both himself and his sister in such an expensive town and they instead moved to Goslar. The separation, with the expenses, made it impossible for Wordsworth to spend time with Coleridge until after the winter of 1798.

The contrast between being with Coleridge and being without his friend caused Wordsworth great strain, and he partly blamed Dorothy for his suffering. This separation was compounded further by the expenses because Coleridge was able to entertain nobility and intellectuals, while Wordsworth's poverty forced him to live modestly. Wordsworth's envy of Coleridge's position was revealed in his writing, and even describes Coleridge and his company as "more favored sojourners... chattering and chatter'd to, through the whole day". With all the problems caused by Dorothy and his inability to be with his friend, Wordsworth still turned to Dorothy emotionally, although their relationship would be strained by the many months that they were alone with each other. To overcome the strain being separated from his friend and forced to live alone with his sister, Wordsworth relied on the "Lucy" poems as his emotional outlet.

Identity of Lucy

There are many possibilities as to who and what Lucy was intended to represent. Wordsworth never revealed his intentions when creating the character. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Wordsworth's one time friendm the author and renound Opium-eater Thomas DeQuincey (1785–1859) said that Wordsworth "always preserved a mysterious silence on the subject of that 'Lucy', repeatedly alluded to or apostrophised in his poems, and I have heard, from gossiping people about Hawkshead, some snatches of tragic story, which, after all, might be an idle semi-fable, improved out of slight materials".

Lucy's identity has been the subject of much speculation among historians and literary critics. Writing in 1938, Herbert Hartman characterized Lucy as a name that comes from "a neo-Arcadian commonplace" and represents no one person specifically. However, Lucy is thought by others to represent Wordsworth's childhood friend, and sister of his later wife, Peggy Hutchinson, with whom the poet was in love before her early death in 1796. Other critics believe that Lucy represents Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy. Of these critics, some claim that the poems are an attempt by Wordsworth to voice his affection for Dorothy; this line of thought reasoning that the poems dramatise Wordsworth's feelings of grief for her inevitable death.

Taking the opposite approach, the literature critic Richard Matlak wrote in 1978 that Dorothy represented a financial burden on Wordsworth and effectively forced a separation from Coleridge by creating the necessity of a move to Germany. Soon after the series completion, Coleridge wrote, "Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph / whether it had any reality, I cannot say. — Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die." Wordsworth, depressed over being separated for such a long time from his friend, expressed both his love for his sister and wish to get rid of her through the death of the Lucy character. However, it is possible that Wordsworth simply feared her death and did not wish her death, even subconsciously.

Reflecting on the importance and relevance of Lucy's identity, the nineteenth-century literary critic Frederic Myers said,

"here it was that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on Lucy. Of the history of that emotion, he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore, to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the poet's honour, I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets rightly? or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone, Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever."

According to Karl Kroeber, "Wordsworth's Lucy possesses a double existence; her actual, historical existence and her idealised existence in the poet's mind. The latter is created out of the former but neither an abstraction nor a conceptualisation, because the idealised Lucy is at least as "concrete" as the actual Lucy. In the poem, Lucy is both actual and idealised, but her actuality is relevant only insofar as it makes manifest the significance implicit in the actual girl". Hartman has the same view, and Lucy "is seen entirely from within the poet, so that this modality may be the poet's own" but then argues"she belongs to the category of spirits who must still become human, and the poet describes her as dying at a point at which she would have been humanized."

The literary historian Kenneth Johnson concluded that Lucy was created as the personification of Wordsworth's muse, "and the group as a whole is a series of invocations to a Muse feared dead. As epitaphs, they are not sad, a very inadequate word to describe them, but breathlessly, almost aware of what such a loss would mean to the speaker: 'oh, the difference to me!'"

According to Mary Moorman, "The identity of 'Lucy' has been the problem of critics for many years. But Wordsworth is a poet before he is a biographer, and neither 'Lucy' nor her home nor his relations with her are necessarily in the strict sense historical. Nevertheless, as the Lyrical Ballads were all of them 'founded on fact' in some way, and as Wordsworth's mind was essentially factual, it would be rash to say that Lucy is entirely fictitious." Moorman also favours the argument that it is possible that Lucy represents Mary Hutchinson,

Other examples of Dorothy/Lucy interchanging can be found in "The Glow-Worm" and "Nutting". Dorothy's declaring that "Strange Fits of Passion I have known" as her favorite strengthens that she would have thought the poem was about her. However, Wordsworth uses other names for Dorothy and uses another Lucy (Lucy Gray) in his poetry. Wordsworth also responded to poetry that described characters named Lucy. If Lucy is Dorothy, Wordsworth's discussion of her death is not the common depiction of her in his poetry. If "Strange Fits of Passion" was about Lucy, the others could simply be a continuation of the poetic theme and not necessarily focusing on Dorothy or her death. This could explain why the Lucy of "Three years she grew" is described in a manner that does not connect the character to any woman that Wordsworth knew.

Moorman wonders that "If Lucy is Mary, why should she be dead"/ It is possible that Wordsworth was thinking of a girl who was dead, and that he could have loved her, and that this girl was Hutchison's sister, Margaret. However, there is no evidence that Wordsworth loved any of the Hutchinsons besides Mary and Margaret's death is possibly only an influence and not the basis of Lucy.

John Mahoney points out that "whether Lucy is Dorothy or Mary or, indeed, anybody in particular is much less important than what she is in the evolving cast of characters of the Lyrical Ballads"; she is a hidden being who seems to lack flaws and is alone in the world. Furthermore, she is represented as being insignificant in the public sphere but of the utmost importance in the private sphere, and in "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" this is represented by Lucy being compared to both a hidden flower and a shining star. When compared to the other female characters in Wordsworth's poems, as Anne Mellor points out, it is revealed that they "do not exist as independent self-conscious human beings with minds as capable of the poet's" and are "rarely allowed to speak for themselves."

This is not to say that there is a much greater emphasis on Lucy's lover, the poem's narrator. The lover slowly disappeared from the poems as they progress and is not present in the fifth poem. His love operates on the unconscious level and connects Lucy to natural images. His grief is private and, although known that it exists, it cannot be fully explained. When the lover of Lucy is present, he is completely immersed in human interactions and the human aspects of nature, and the death of his beloved is a total loss for the lover. As such, the lover, according to Spencer Hall, represents a "fragile kind of humanism".

Themes

Nature

Wordsworth established his reputation, according to the critic Norman Lacey, as a "poet of nature". Early works, such as Tintern Abbey, can be viewed as odes to his experience of nature, although he preferred to avoid this interpretation. They can further be seen as lyrical meditations on the fundamental character of the natural world. Wordsworth said that as a youth, nature stirred in him, "an appetite, a feeling and a love", but by the time he wrote "Lyrical Ballads", it evoked "the still sad music of humanity". The five "Lucy" poems are often interpreted as representing both his opposing views of nature and a meditation on natural cycle of life. The poems describe the relationship between humanity and nature, and often reflect quite different perspectives on this relationship.

According to Cleanth Brooks, "Strange fits" presents "Kind Nature's gentlest boon", "Three years" its duality, and "A slumber" the clutter of natural object. In Jones view, "She dwelt", along with "I travelled", represents its "rustication and disappearance". Mahoney views "Three years" as describing a masculine, benevolent nature that is like a creator deity. Nature shapes Lucy over time and she is seen as part of nature herself, but the poem takes an abrupt shift when Lucy suddenly dies. Lucy, like nature, appears to be eternal, but since she is still subject to the rules of nature, in the end she dies. Although there is a sense of loss within the poem, there is still the feeling that Lucy's life was complete because she was raised by nature, and her death would leave a mental impression that would stimulate others which would allow her to survive in memories of her life. She became, according to the American poet and writer David Ferry, "not so much a human being as a sort of compendium of nature" and "Her death was right, after all, for by dying she was one with the natural processes that made her die, and fantastically ennobled thereby."

The Lucy poems serve as a bridge between poetry of reality and poetry of imagination. They combine rural themes with mental creations, and view nature as both benevolent and malevolent. To Hartman, the idea of Lucy serves as a connection between humanity and nature, "a boundary being, nature sprite and human, yet not quite either. She reminds us of the traditional mythical person who lives, ontologically, an intermediate life, or mediates various realms of existence. Nymphs, both watery and human, are an example". However, there is a negative side to nature, and nature can be a malevolent force and ambivalent to humanity, and, as Hall argues, "In all of these poems, nature would seem to betray the heart that loves her".

Death

The Lucy poems use the notion of death to create ambiguity between the sublime and nothingness. This is achieved by the Lucy poems' struggle with a manner to represent death. In particular, the poems try to answer the how to describe the death of a girl that is connected to nature and what is left of her life after she has died. The poems form a rite of passage and, according to Hartman,

"They center in a death or a radical change of consciousness which is expressed in semi-mythical form; and they are, in fact, Wordsworth's nearest approach to a personal myth.... In genre the nearest important equivalents (near and yet so far) are Herrick's laments on the death of virgins. The Lucy poems are more mysterious, however; their mode lying between ritual mourning and personal reminiscence."

The narrator is affected greatly by her death and cries out in "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" that "The difference is to me!" but "A slumber did my spirit seal" is sheltered from such trauma by sleep and is able to see her as part of nature. He deludes himself into believing that Lucy cannot die. Even in death, Lucy is not a true person, but is connected to nature. However, Lucy is represented by the narrator, and her importance and essence is centered in the narrator. When Lucy does die, she serves as a force to bring about a new consciousness that nature can bring about pain even to those who love her. As such, H. W. Garrod declared that, "The truth is, as I believe, that between Lucy's perfection in Nature and her death there is, for Wordsworth, really no tragic antithesis at all."

If Lucy represents Dorothy; the death of Lucy allows Wordsworth to confront his frustration with his sister. However, the subconscious desire for his sister to die would cause Wordsworth to be strained and become guilt ridden, as he loved his sister dearly. The poems are marked with the narrator mourning over the loss of his beloved, and the mourning is most apparent in the poems when the narrator's ambivalence towards the lover peak. It is not until "I travelled among unknown men", the last poem to be composed, that the narrator overcomes his ambivalence towards Lucy, and in turn overcomes his grief.The narrator's mixture of mourning over Lucy and the antipathy he felt towards her were accompanied by denial and guilt. Lucy, the subject of the poems, is physically absent from the plot, and Wordsworth attempts to hide his desires for the death of his sister by describing Lucy as dying from natural causes. The original copy of "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" describes Lucy's death as the result of disease. The denial of the Lucy/Dorothy relationship and the lack of narratorial responsibility for the death of Lucy allows Wordsworth to escape from questioning his desires for the death of his sister. In "Three years she grew in sun and shower", the narrator is able to transfer any guilt for her death away from himself and onto a manifested form of Nature.

Critical assessment

The first opinion of the poems comes from Dorothy, from a letter sent to Coleridge in December 1798. Of "Strange fits of passion", she tells Coleridge, " next poem is a favorite of mine—i.e. of me Dorothy—". The first recorded mention of any of the "Lucy poems" (outside of notes by either William or Dorothy) occurred after the April 1799 death of Coleridge's son Berkeley. Coleridge was then living in Germany, and received the news through a letter from Thomas Poole, who in his condolences mentioned Wordsworth's "A slumber".

But I cannot truly say that I grieve — I am perplexed — I am sad — and a little thing, a very trifle would make me weep; but for the death of the Baby I have not wept! — Oh! this strange, strange, strange Scene-shifter, Death! that giddies one with insecurity, & so unsubstantiates the living Things that one has grasped and handled! — / Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph / whether it has any realisy, I cannot say. — Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die.

Of his other contemporary's opinions, Charles Lamb, wrote to Wordsworth in 1801 to say that "She dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" was one of his favorite poems of Lyrical Ballads. Likewise, John Stoddard thought positively of "Strange fits" and "She dwelt", and John Keats praised "She dwelt". William Blake merely marked an "X" besides "Strange fits", along with two other poems on the contents page of his copy of Wordsworth's Poems (1815).

Besides word of mouth and opinions in letters, there were a few contemporary reviews in journals and in print. The writer and journalist John Stoddart (1773-1856), in a review of Lyrical Ballads, described "Strange fits of passion I have known" and "She dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" as "the most singular specimens of unpretending, yet irresistible pathos". However, a review of Poems in Two Volumes declares that "I travell'd among unknown men" was "Another string of flat lines about Lucy is succeeded by an ode to Duty". Francis Jeffrey claimed that, in "Strange fits of passion I have known", "Mr Wordsworth, however, has thought fit to compose a piece, illustrating this copious subject by one single thought. A lover trots away to see his mistress one fine evening, staring all the way at the moon: when he comes to her door, 'O mercy! to myself I cried, / If Lucy should be dead!' And there the poem ends!". Thomas Powell wrote that "A slumber did my spirit steal"

stands by itself, and is without title prefixed, yet we are to know, from the penetration of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers, that it is a sequel to the other deep poems that precede it, and is about one Lucy, who is dead. From the table of contents, however, we are informed by the author that it is about 'A Slumber;' for this is the actual title which he has condescended to give it, to put us out of pain as to what it is about.

To Henry Crabb Robinson, "She dwelt" gave "the powerful effect of the loss of a very obscure object upon one tenderly attached to it — the opposition between the apparent strength of the passion and the insignificance of the object is delightfully conceived".

Many of the Victorian critics appreciated the emotion of the Lucy poems, with John Wilson describing "Strange fits of passion" in 1842 as "powerfully pathetic". In 1849, Frank Parson said the poem was "true pathos. We are moved to our soul's centre by sorrow expressed as that is; for, without periphrasis or wordy anguish, without circumlocution of officious and obtrusive, and therefore, artificial grief; the mourner gives sorrow words... But he does it in words as few as may be: how intense their beauty!" A few years later, John Wright, in The Genius of Wordsworth, describes a contemporary praising that "Strange fits of passion" had a "deep but subdued and "silent fervour".

Alan Grob belived that "the principal importance of the 'Mathew' and 'Lucy' poems, apart from their intrinsic achievement, substantial as that is, is in suggesting the presence of seeds of discontent even in a period of seemingly assured faith that makes the sequence of developments int he history of Wordsworth's thought a more orderly, evolving pattern than the chronological leaps between stages would seem to imply."

Parody

The Lucy poems have been parodied numerous times since first published. In part, the parodies were intended to remark on the simplification of textual complexities and deliberate ambiguities in poetry, and on the way many 19th century critics sought to establish 'definitive' reasonings. According to Jones, such pradioes sought to comment in a "meta-criticial" manner, and to present an alternative mode of critism to the then mainstream mode. Among the more notable are those by Samuel Taylor's son Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) ("A Bard whom there were none to praise/And very few to read") in 1834, and the 1888 murder-mystery reading of the poem by Victorian author Samuel Butler (1835–1902) . Butler belived Wordsworth's use of the phrase "the difference to me!" was overtly tearse, and remarked that the poet was "most careful not to explain the nature of the difference which the death of Lucy will occasion him to be...The superficial reader takes it that he is very sorry she was dead...but he has not said this."

These parodies were intended to question definitive interpretation of the series, and highlight its indeterminacies. This is particularly true of Butler, who satirised over emotive interpretations of the Lucy poems,

I said above, 'as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have felt'; for anyone imbued with the spirit of modern science will read Wordsworth's poem with different eyes from those of a mere literary critic. He will note that Wordsworth is most careful not to explain the nature of the difference which the death of Lucy will occasion to him. He tells us that there will be a difference; but there the matter ends. The superficial reader takes it that he was very sorry she was dead; it is, of course, possible that he may have actually been so, but he has not said this. On the contrary, he has hinted plainly that she was ugly, and generally disliked; she was only like a violet when she was half-hidden from the view, and only fair as a star when there were so few stars that it was practically impossible to make an individuous comparison. If there were as many as even two stars the likeness was felt to be at an end. If Wordsworth had imprudently promised to marry this young person during a time when he had been unusually long in keeping to good resolutions, and had afterwards seen someone who he liked better, then Lucy's death would undoubtedly hae made a considerable difference to him, and this is all that he has ever said that it would do. What right have we to put glosses upon the masterly reticence of a poet, and credit him with feelings possibly the very reverse of those he actually entertained? ... If Lucy was the kind of person not obscurely portrayed in the poem; if Wordsworth had murdered her, either by cutting her throat or smothering her, in concert, perhaps, with his friends Southey and Coleridge; and if he had thus found himself released from an engagement which had become irksome to him, or possibly from the threat of an action for breach of promise, then there is not a syllable in the poem with which he crowns his crime that is not alive with meaning. On any other supposition to the general reader it is unintelligible.

Notes

1. Gilbert, Allan H; Allen, Gay Wilson; Clark, Harry Hayden 1962. 198
2. Murray 1967, 5
3. Matlak 1978, 46–47
4. ^ Moorman 1968, 422
5. ^ Matlak 1978, 47
6. Wordsworth 1991, 302
7. Branch 2006, 176
8. This was from Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and actually starts on page 175 of Branch. Branch only discusses the Lyrical Ballads as a whole and does not mention the Lucy poems separately.
9. Jones 1995, 7–8
10. Taaffee 1966, 175
11. Jones 1995, 10
12. Matlak 1978, 51
13. Hartman 1967, 23
14. Hartman 1967, 23–24
15. Hartman 1967, 24–25
16. ^ Matlak 1978, 53
17. Wordsworth knew three rivers of that name; in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Westmorland, but each could equally be the setting for the verse.
18. ^ Ober and Ober, 2005
19. Slakey, 629
20. ^ Jones 1995, 4
21. "Poetry, Sacred and Profane". Nottinghamshire Guardian, October 30, 1853.
22. ^ Woolford 2003
23. Brooks, 729–741
24. Durrant, Geoffrey. "William Wordsworth". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. 61
25. Woodring, 44 & 48
26. Hartman 1934, 134–42
27. Grob 1973, 202–203
28. Eilenberg, 125
29. C. Letters, I. 479–80
30. ^ Ford, 165
31. Hirsch 2008
32. Jones 1995, 8
33. Matlak 1978, 51–52
34. Wordsworth 1967, 237–238
35. This original text should probably be part of the "Strange fits" page, with only the surrounding lines included
36. Abrams 2000 A-4 note 1
37. Matlak 1978, 55
38. ^ Wordsworth 1967, 236–237
39. ^ Matlak 1978, 54
40. ^ Rolfe, i
41. Murray, 85
42. Jones, 6
43. Wordsworth 1967, 236
44. Ford 1957, 186–206
45. Wordsworth 1967, 335
46. Matlak 1978, 48
47. Wordsworth 1967, 200
48. Matlak 1978, 48–49
49. Matlak 1978, 50
50. Wordsworth 1967, 254
51. Matlak 1978, 50–51
52. De Quincey 1839, 247
53. Abrams 2000, 251 note 1
54. Hartman 1938, 141
55. Cavendish 2005, 55
56. ^ Matlak 1978, 46
57. Johnson, 464
58. Jones 1995, 51
59. Myers 1906. 34
60. Kroeber 1964, 106–107
61. ^ Hartman 1967, 158
62. Johnson, 463
63. Moorman 1968, 423
64. This is assertion strongly contested; see Margoliouth, H. M. "Wordsworth and Coleridge 1795–1834". 1966. London: Oxford University Press. 52
65. Moorman 1968, 423–424
66. Moorman 1968, 424
67. Margoliouth, 52–56
68. Moorman 1968, 425
69. Mahoney 1997, 105–106
70. Bateson 1954, 33
71. Mellor 1993, 19
72. Hartman 1964, 159
73. Grob 1973, 201–202
74. Hall 1971, 160–161
75. Lacey, 1
76. Lacey, 3
77. ^ Jones 1995, 190.
78. Brooks, 736
79. Mahoney 1993, 107–108
80. Beer 1978, 98
81. Ferry 1959, 76–78
82. Mahoney 1997, 105
83. Jones 1995, 198–199
84. Hall 1979, 166
85. Beer 1978, 199
86. Fry 1995, 105
87. Beer 1978, 95
88. Hartman 1967, 157–158
89. Mahoney 1997, 106
90. Hartman 1967, 158–159
91. Hartman 1967, 161
92. Garrod 1929, 83
93. Bateson 1954, 153
94. Matlak 1978, 54–55
95. Wordsworth 1991, 237
96. Wordsworth 1967, 479
97. Jones 1995, 57–58
98. qtd in Jones 1995, 56
99. Le Beau Monde 2, October 1807, 140
100. Jeffrey 1808, 136
101. Powell 1831, 563
102. Robinson 1938, 191
103. Wilson 1842, 328
104. Wright 1853, 29
105. Grob 1973, 204
106. Jones, 95
107. Hamilton, Walter. "Parodies of the Works of English & American Authors". Michigan: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1888. 95.
108. Davies 1995
109. Butler 1913, 102–103

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External links

• Biography and Works of William Wordsworth

• Works by William Wordsworth
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