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.
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