Wordsworth's Lucy Poems

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote five poems that were formed into a group after his death in 1850. The group is called the Lucy poems, and all but one of the poems was written in 1799 while he and his sister Dorothy were visiting Germany. During their time there, Wordsworth became depressed. He missed his collaborator and closest friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was homesick for England. No one has been able to identify who this Lucy was, although scholars speculate that she might be based on his sister Dorothy or his future wife, Mary Hutchinson. Though other critics see her as fictional or a literary device, a strategy simply invented by Wordsworth’s fertile imagination. The poems are elegiac ballads about love and untimely death. They are tinged with a speaker’s unremitting grief, and they suggest Wordsworth was not only an unparalleled writer of nature poetry, but also was one with a poignantly elegiac voice.

In the first poem, the speaker experiences a frightening fear that suddenly shocks him:

                Strange Fits of Passion Have I Know 

Strange fits of passion have I know
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the side lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"

As a ballad, this poem narrates a story, one which is brief and limited in action. The speaker journeys one night to his lover’s cottage. Before he begins his tale, he tells the reader that “Strange fits of passion have I known” but will only reveal to his Lover what those “fits” are. Of course, once we read the last line, we learn the particular effect of the fit overwhelms the speaker in this poem when he imagines the possibility of Lucy’s death. That final line likely startles the reader as it does the speaker with its abrupt and unexpected dark exclamation. What brings about this wave of fear that fills the speaker?

When the speaker begins his journey to Lucy’s cottage, he states that “she I loved looked every day / Fresh as a rose in June.” While her lovely, youthful appearance is in his imagination his eyes become “fixed” on the “evening moon” above him. He and his horse “climbed the hill,” and the moon seems to be sinking closer to “Lucy’s cot.” At this point, the speaker drifts into “one of those sweet dreams” of sleep with yet opened eyes, which he identifies as “Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!” Carried along in this trance-like state by his horse, the speaker awakens suddenly by the dropping of the moon behind Lucy’s “cottage roof.” This brief narrative poem ends with the speaker approaching always nearer his destination but never reaching it and we are suspended with him and his anxiety in time and place with each reading of the poem.

The poem “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” praises Lucy’s beauty and virtue and, this time mourns her actual death:

       She Dwelt Among Untrodden the Ways

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!

Perhaps this is the same woman as in the first poem, but we cannot be certain she is. Here, Lucy lived apart from the world, lived as a “Maid whom there was none to praise / And very few to love…” Her anonymity was a loss to humanity, since her beauty was singularly rare, distinguished by the second stanza’s metaphor of “A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye!” and the simile of “…a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky.” The final stanza reiterates her obscurity, then registered his devastating loss of Lucy in those last lines, which acknowledge that any further expression of grief is impossible.

The next Lucy Poem is the longest and introduces Nature as a character:

         Three Years She Grew

Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mold the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

"And vital feeling of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell."

Thus Nature spake--the work was done--
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.

In stanza 1, the speaker begins a brief story that will bring him sorrow. He tells us that Nature chose three years old Lucy to be “A Lady of my own.” In stanza 2, Nature says that she will “feel an overseeing power /To kindle or restrain.” In 3, She shall be “sportive” and sensitive. In 4 and 5, Nature will see that all things within Nature’s realm and cosmos will “mold the Maiden’s form.” In 6, Nature will instruct Lucy to cherish the gifts of earth. Through Nature, Lucy becomes a paragon of beauty and vitality. But that excellence is short-lived, and in the last stanza, we learn of Lucy’s death.

Like “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” the speaker’s sorrow is profound. Lucy has “left to me / This heath, this calm, and quiet scene.” Will this tranquility of Nature console him? More likely, he will despair over what “never more will be.”

The shortest of the Lucy’s poems is “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”:

         A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

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 earth's diurnal course,
  With rocks, and stones, and tree.

The force of this pithy statement of grief cannot be overstated. The speaker perception of Lucy in stanza 1 is numbed, in a state of sleep. The question is, did a “slumber” make him simply unaware of the possibility of Lucy’s mortality, or did Lucy’s youth and beauty seem immortal and beguile him into a “slumber”? Reading stanza 2, Lucy could not “Feel / The touch of earthly years” and she slumbers now in the eternity of death. And in that death, Lucy becomes one with “earthly years” now beyond time as she whirls in “…earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

The last of the Lucy poems is “I traveled Among Unknown Men.” This poem was written two years after Wordsworth wrote the other four. The anxiety and grief that resonates through the earlier poems appears to be displaced in this one by Wordsworth’s love of England:

   I Traveled Among unknown men

I traveled among unknown men,
   In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
   What love I bore to thee.

'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
   Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
   To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel
   The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
   Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
   The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
   That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

“I Traveled Among Unknown Men” might disappoint the reader. It seems rather tame after the intensity of the first four Lucy poems. England has now become the object of the speaker’s love—for the English countryside with its mountains and “green field[s].” Though Lucy appears in this poem, she certainly seems secondary to nature (lower case ‘n’ here). Still, she remains a mystery and fortunately always will. 

Sailing to Byzantium

From the earliest of his poems to the last ones he wrote, William Butler Yeats frequently dwelt on the subject of growing old. Perhaps his most famous poem that addresses aging is “Sailing to Byzantium.” For anyone who is interested in getting to know Yeats’s poetry, this poem is among the dozen or so that is essential to read. It was written in 1926, when Yeats was sixty-one. It is challenging intellectually, but also powerfully poignant.

                 Sailing to Byzantium

                                     1
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

                                      2
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

                                       3
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
and be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

                                       4
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

In this poem, Yeats rejects the sensuality of sexual passion and yearns to journey away from all things physical to a realm of abstract, idealized artistic beauty. Stanza 1 snaps our attention with the curt statement “That is no country for men. Ireland is “no country for old men” such as Yeats, since he sees the passionate young in “one another’s arms and hears birdsongs joyfully celebrating their fertility and believes he is too old and infirm to participate in that world of sensual fulfillment. The one quality he still possesses that should “commend” him to his country, his creative prowess, is of little value where “all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

In stanza 2, Yeats fashions a distressing image of himself: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick.” Yet, within this “paltry thing” still exists the soul, and if that “Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing, / For every tatter in its mortal dress,” it can transport him to a realm where “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” is the true music to replace the music of sensuality. As stanza 2 closes, Yeats announces that he has actually already left Ireland: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” Why Byzantium? In A Vision, (1925) a book he published shortly before he wrote the poem, Yeats revealed his belief that artists were truly valued there: “I think that if I could be given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia...I think that early Byzantium, maybe never before or since recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architects and artificers…spoke to the multitude…”

In stanza 3, Yeats does not just imagine himself roaming the ancient city; he locates himself within Byzantium’s holiest structure, the Church of the Hagia Sophia. Once there, the speaker invokes the sages to leave “God’s” purifying “fire,” beseeching them to be the “singing-masters of my soul” and “Consume my heart away.” Of course, old age has withered him and would be enough to justify his request of the sages, but it is not old age or encroaching mortality only that compels his need to escape the physical world; he calls for a spiritual transformation to achieve artistic: immortality: “…and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” His request flows also from the anguish he feels in stanza 1 and 2, his alienation from the fertile world of vigorous sexuality. Though his heart is “fastened to a dying animal” it is not his age or fear of death that makes him ill; it is the combination of having a heart made “sick” by the “desire” that can no longer be fulfilled.

Stanza 4 is curious in that Yeats seems to have moved back in time to Ireland and is once again imagining himself out of his physical body and transformed into art. In the first two lines he employs the future tense verb to indicates what he intends to do: “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing” [.] He continues in this future frame with what he envisions to be one possible “form” of existence he could assume: “But such form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling” [.] As a work of gold sculpture, Yeats will be transformed into an aesthetic untouched by deprivations of old age. But this “artifice of eternity” takes away his poetic voice making him a static figure, seen but never heard. His second idea of a bird set upon a “golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come” immortalizes Yeats’s poetry through both time and space.

September 1913

William Butler Yeats’s “September 1913” is one of his best and most anthologized political poems. The poem’s title was originally “Romance in Ireland (On reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery).” Its present title appeared in his collection Responsibilities 1914. Knowing the social context of Ireland at the time of the poem’s composition deepens the reader’s understanding and appreciation of this great poem. For five years prior to the poem, the Irish art dealer Hugh Lane offered to bequeath paintings he had acquired during his years as a collector to the city of Dublin. His only condition was that the Dublin Corporation provide funds to build a municipal art gallery to house the works. These paintings would include works by Corot, Manet, Degas and Renoir. During five years of negotiation between Lane and the Corporation, William Martin Murphy, a railroad magnet and publisher of the Irish Independent, vehemently opposed funding for the gallery. His newspaper published dozens of letters from middle- and upper-class Dubliners who also objected to the gallery, but not because of the money it would require constructing it. Rather, many of them claimed that the art intended for the gallery was vulgar and violated Catholic morals. Arguing in favor of the proposed gallery, Yeats initially wrote a poem explicitly about the controversy, “To a Wealthy Man who promised a second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures,” which lambasts the shallow middle- and upper-class attitudes toward art. In “September 1913,” Yeats not only exposes the middle- and upper-classes as philistines who value materialism above all else; he also grieves for a heroic, “romantic” Ireland he believed existed in the past but now is “dead.” The poem is composed as a ballad, with a refrain closing each stanza with a reference to John O’Leary, (1830-1907). O’Leary was an Irish patriot who was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He agitated for Irish Home Rule in the 19th century and was arrested for treason and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. He served five years then was exiled for the remainder of his sentence.

                   September 1913
 What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
The have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wings upon every tide;
For this that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, "Some woman's yellow hair
Had maddened every mother's son":
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

In the first stanza, Yeats scorns his countrymen who are only interested in adding their “halfpence to the pence” and timidly saying their prayers. Ireland no longer produces men who possess the noble and heroic qualities of the past. Men like O’Leary who sacrificed their liberty or life in the struggle to free Ireland from British rule. Stanza 2 alludes to the men of the past, “names that stilled your childish play,” who without reservation gave themselves to the “hangman’s rope.” Stanza 3 identifies noble men of the past, Fitzgerald, Tone, and Emmet who died fighting for Ireland against England’s oppressive rule.

Yeats’s contempt for the shallow materialism and religious hypocrisy of his Irish countrymen is easy to understand and justify. No doubt, there was much of both circulating among the citizens of Dublin when he wrote the poem. Yeats seems to have been unaware in this poem that in Dublin at the time was also a nobility and bravery that was growing and would surface in the Easter rebellion of 1916. That week-long hopeless but valiant uprising would reverse Yeats’s thinking and inspire his other great poem about what the Irish were capable of.