The Lucy Poems

William Wordsworth wrote the first four of these five poems during the winter of 1798–99, while he and his sister Dorothy lived in Goslar, a small town in Lower Saxony. They had crossed to Germany with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in September 1798, but Coleridge soon left for university towns, and the Wordsworths spent a bitter winter in near-total isolation. Wordsworth sent three of the poems to Coleridge in a December 1798 letter, calling them “little Rhyme poems.” Four appeared in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800. The fifth, “I Travelled Among Unknown Men,” was written in April 1801 and first published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. Wordsworth never said who Lucy was. Coleridge, reading “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” guessed she stood for Dorothy. Later scholars have proposed Mary Hutchinson, a composite figure, or no real person at all. Wordsworth kept his silence on the question, and the poems offer no answer.

“Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” sets a rider moving toward Lucy’s cottage under a sinking moon; as the moon drops behind the roof, the speaker cries out, “If Lucy should be dead!” The dread arrives from nowhere and is never resolved. “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” compresses an entire life into three stanzas, comparing Lucy to “A violet by a mossy stone” and a solitary star, then announces her death in the flat closing line: “But she is in her grave, and, oh, / The difference to me!” In “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower,” Nature speaks, claiming the child and promising to shape her by “law and impulse,” by storm and calm—only for the speaker to report that Nature’s work ended in death, leaving him with “The memory of what has been, / And never more will be.” “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” says everything in eight lines and never names Lucy at all: the first stanza holds the speaker in a trance where she “seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years,” and the second drops her into the ground, “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.” “I Travelled Among Unknown Men” turns outward, binding grief for Lucy to love of England itself—“Thine is, too, the last green field / Which Lucy’s eyes survey’d!”

All five poems work in ballad stanzas rooted in hymns and folk song, though “Three Years She Grew” stretches each stanza to six lines and lets Nature speak at length. Plain language carries them: mostly monosyllables, few adjectives, almost no ornament. Death is never described, only reported, and the shock falls in the gap between what the speaker knew and what has happened. Wordsworth did not group these poems himself. Thomas Powell first suggested reading them together in 1831; decades later, Matthew Arnold’s selection of Wordsworth’s poetry presented all five as a set, and the grouping held. Written between the first Lyrical Ballads and the period that produced the Intimations Ode, the Lucy poems now stand near the center of Wordsworth’s early work. They are among the shortest and most studied lyrics in English Romantic poetry, not for what they explain about Lucy but for what they refuse to explain.