User:Fowler&fowler/The Lucy poems

William Shuter, Portrait of William Wordsworth, 1798. Earliest known portrait of Wordsworth, from the year he wrote the first draft of the Lucy poems.

The Lucy poems are a series of five poems composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) between 1798 and 1801. They were first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), a volume of verse written jointly by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Wordsworth’s first major publication and a milestone in the development of the English Romantic movement. The series centres on the narrator's unrequited love for Lucy, who has died. She remains physically distant in all five poems and her death weighs heavily on the poet throughout, imbuing the verse with a melancholy, elegiac tone.

The "Lucy poems" are considered among Wordsworth's finest work. Although they are presented as a series today, Wordsworth did not conceive of them as a group, nor did he publish the poems together. Following his stay in Goslar, Germany during 1798–1799, he made many revisions to the poems and their sequencing in Lyrical Ballads . Although he did not change the theory of his poetry and claimed to be only refining his development from mirroring to expressing aspects of life, thematic shifts are evident from the surviving drafts. Only after Wordsworth's death in 1850 did publishers and critics start to treat the poems as a fixed series, and since then anthologies have presented them as a group.

Whether the character Lucy was based on a real woman or was a figment of the poet's imagination has long been a matter of debate amongst scholars. Generally reticent about the poems, Wordsworth never revealed the details of her identity. Some have speculated that Lucy is based on Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, while others see her as an idealised figure. Scholars, however, agree that Lucy is a literary device employed by the poet to meditate on loss, nature and beauty.

Background

Lyrical Ballads

See also: William Wordsworth's early life‎

William Wordsworth was born in 1770, the son of legal agent <What is a legal agent?> §clarified. John Wordsworth and his wife Ann. The second of five children, he was educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and graduated from St John's College, Cambridge in 1791. Following college, Wordsworth spent time <how much?> travelling in France, even though the Revolution was then at its height. He returned to Britain late in the following year, and after traveling through England and Wales, he settled in London with the intent of working as a journalist. Sometime in late August or September of 1795, he met <fellow we weren't told that W. was a poet at that time>§ removed poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Bristol. The <precise Is the approximate circumstance known? If so, mention that instead.>§removed "precise"; will investigate further circumstance of their first meeting is uncertain, but <it ambiguous> the meeting §reworded laid the foundation for an intense and profoundly creative friendship, based in part on their shared disdain for the artificial diction <What is this? Replace with something more intelligible> of the poetry of the era. From 1797 <until when? or say, "After 1797 ...">, the two lived within walking distance of each other in Somerset. They had planned to write as co-authors collaborate, but never progressed further than got beyond making suggestions or notes <notes for what? i.e. how are "notes" different from "suggestions?" For example, is "offering suggestions and taking down notes" meant?> for each other’s verse. However, in In 1798, however, they did jointly published Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, a collection of verses poems each had written separately. The book had such <a significant "such a" = "significant"> an impact that it is generally considered to have <heralded peacock?> the beginning of ushered in the Romantic movement in English literature. <Here "Romantic movement" is too anonymous. It should be explained briefly in another sentence.>

Title page for the first edition of Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth's aim when composing his contributions was to arrive at a "selection of the language really spoken by men". <Do we need "selection of the?" i.e. why not simply "to arrive at 'language really spoken by men?'" Also, since this phrase will again be repeated in the full quotation below, it may be best to provide gist here in own words.> The preface to the 1802 edition of the Lyrical Ballads sets out his aim:

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.

Between October 1798 and February 1799, Wordsworth worked on the first draft of the "Lucy poems" together with a number of other verses, including as well as on others that included the "Matthew poems", "Lucy Gray" and The Prelude. He was then now living in Goslar in Lower Saxony, Germany, where he had relocated upon having moved there after the expiration of his lease of his house Alfoxton House in Somerset had expired. <Note: it seems, from the next sentence, that he was not forced to leave as a result of not being able to renew his lease, but rather made an active decision to move to be closer to various people. Also "Alfoxton House" should be (first) mentioned earlier (if this is important), not after he had left it.> His intention was to settle live with his sister, and with Coleridge and Coleridge's wife: "to pass the two ensuing years in order to acquire the German language, and to furnish ourselves with a tolerable stock of information in natural science". <Is this a decision that was made by all four? Or even W. and C? If so, it should stated as such and not as W.'s intention alone.> Coleridge had yet to join them, and Wordsworth's separation from his friend depressed him. In the three months following their parting, Wordsworth completed the first three of the "Lucy poems": "Strange fits of passion have I known", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways", and "A slumber did my spirit seal". They The poems first appeared in a letter to Coleridge dated December 1798, in which Wordsworth wrote that "She dwelt..." and "Strange fits..." were offered Coleridge two "little Rhyme poems which I hope will amuse you...". Wordsworth characterised the two poems thus to mitigate any disappointment Coleridge might suffer in receiving these two poems instead of the in lieu of a promised three-part philosophical epic The Recluse, the deprecatory note having been added, presumably, to allay disappointment. The fourth Lucy poem, "Three years she grew in sun and shower", was written in the days preceding Wordsworth's reunion with Coleridge. The final poem, "I travelled among unknown men", came would come two years later, shortly before Wordsworth was again separated from Coleridge.

Separation from Coleridge

Wordsworth wrote all but one of the "Lucy poems" while living in Germany and simultaneously struggling with loneliness and anxiety. In a December 1798 letter to Coleridge, he describes his torment:

As I have had no books I have been obliged to write in self-defense. 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.

Peter Van Dyke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795; portrayed when he was 23 years old. A major poet and one of the foremost critics of the day, Coleridge not only collaborated on Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth, but also remained a close friend and confidant for many years.

Judging his life to be both sedentary and dull, believing his poetry to be amounting to little, and seeing the effect of Coleridge's praise on his output, Wordsworth now increasingly sought his friend's company. Dorothy describes the effect Coleridge had on her brother in a March 1798 letter: "His faculties seem to expand every day, he composes with much more facility than he did, as to the mechanism [emphasis in original] of poetry, and his ideas flow faster than he can express them."

With Coleridge serving as confidant and muse, Wordsworth came to believe he could write poetry rivaling that of John Milton. Soon, the expiration of the lease in Alfoxden provided the opportunity for the two friends to live closer. In September 1798, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy traveled to Germany to explore proximate living arrangements. However, this proved harder than had been anticipated. Although they lived together in Hamburg for a short time, they found the city to be too expensive for their budgets. Coleridge soon found accommodations in the town of Ratzeburg in Schleswig-Holstein, which was less expensive but still socially vibrant. The impoverished Wordsworth, however, could neither afford to follow Coleridge nor provide for himself and his sister in Hamburg; the siblings instead moved to moderately-priced accommodations in Goslar.

The abrupt loss of Coleridge's company brought more distress for which Wordsworth partially blamed Dorothy. He felt that the finances that had proved insufficient for supporting the two in Ratzeburg, would have easily supported him alone and allowed him to follow Coleridge. Wordsworth's anguish was compounded by the contrast between the two friends' lives. Coleridge's wherewithal allowed him to entertain lavishly and seek the company of nobles and intellectuals; Wordsworth's more limited means, however, constrained him to live a quiet and modest life. Wordsworth's envy of his friend seeps through in his letters when he describes Coleridge and his new friends as "more favored sojourners" who may "be chattering and chatter'd to, through the whole day." Although Wordsworth did seek emotional support from his sister, their relationship remained strained during their stay in Germany. Separated from his friend and forced to live in the solitary company of his sister, Wordsworth used the "Lucy poems" as an emotional outlet.

The poems

Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829–1904), Margaret Oliphant, 1881. In 1875, Margaret Oliphant was one of the first anthologists to group the poems as "Lucy poems"

Although the "Lucy poems" share stylistic and thematic similarities, it was not Wordsworth but literary critics who first described the five poems as a unified set called the "Lucy poems". The grouping was initiated by Thomas Powell in 1831 and codified by the Scottish historical writer Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) in her 1875 anthology. The 1861 Golden Treasury, complied by the English historian Francis Palgrave (1788–1861), groups only four of the verses, omitting "Strange fits...". The poems next appear as a complete set of five in the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold's (1822–1888) collection of Wordsworth's poems.

The grouping and sequence of the "Lucy poems" has been a matter of some debate in literary circles. Various critics have sought to add poems to the group; among those proposed over the years are "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". None of the proposals have met with widespread acceptance. The five poems included in the Lucy "canon" share a similar focus on the themes of nature, beauty, separation and loss, and most follow the same basic ballad form. Literary scholar Mark Jones offers a general characterisation of a Lucy poem as "an untitled lyrical ballad that either mentions Lucy or is always placed with another poem that does, that either explicitly mentions her death or is susceptible of such a reading, and that is spoken by Lucy's lover."

All of the poems in the series mention Lucy by name, with the exception of "A slumber...". The decision to include this last work is based in part on Wordsworth's decision to place it in close proximity to "Strange fits.." and directly after "She dwelt...". In addition, "I travelled..." 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...". Coleridge biographer J. Dykes Campbell records that Wordsworth also initially gave instructions that "I travelled..." be included directly following "A slumber...", an arrangement that would seem to indicate a connection between the poems. Nevertheless, the question of inclusion is further complicated by Wordsworth's eventual retraction of these instructions and his omission of "I travelled..." in the two subsequent editions of Lyrical Ballads.

The 1815 edition organises the poems into the Poems Founded on the Affections ("Strange fits of passion...", "She dwelt...", and "I travelled...") and Poems of the Imagination ("Three years she grew..." and "A slumber..."). This arrangement allows the two dream-based poems ("Strange fits ..." and "A slumber...") to frame these series and represent the speaker's different sets of experiences over the course of the greater narrative. In terms of chronology, though, "I travelled..." was written last, and this poem serves in a larger sense as a symbolic conclusion—both emotionally and thematically—to the "Lucy poems".

"Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known"

Main article: Strange fits of passion have I known

"Strange fits of passion..." is probably the earliest of the poems in the series, and based around a fantasy of Lucy's death. The poem describes the poet's journey to Lucy's cottage and his thoughts on the way. Ostensibly straightforward, the divided structure of the seven stanzas, in which the motion of the moon is set in opposition to the motion of the speaker, serve to underscore the speaker's ambivalent attitude to the imagined death. The dramatic first stanza contrasts with the subdued tone of rest of the poem. As lyrical ballad, "Strange fits..." differs from the traditional ballad form emphasising abnormal action and instead focuses on mood.

The presence of Death is felt throughout the poem, though only mentioned explicitly in the final line. The moon, functioning here as a symbol of the beloved, sinks lower and lower as the poem progresses, until its abrupt drop in the penultimate stanza. That the speaker has linked Lucy with the moon is clear, though his reasons for doing are not. The moon nevertheless plays a definite role in the action of the poem: its hypnotic motion towards Lucy's cottage parallels that of the lover. By the fifth stanza, the speaker has been lulled into a somnambulistic trance wherein he sleeps while still keeping his eyes on the moon (lines 17–20). His conscious presence is wholly absent from the next stanza, moving forward in what literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman describes as 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 abruptly drops behind the cottage, the narrator snaps sharply out of his dream, and his thoughts turn instantly to death. Lucy, as the beloved, is in death united with the landscape. The image of the moon represents how love causes a lover to be fixated on something beyond the beloved. There remains the darker possibility that the dream state represents the fulfillment of the lover's fantasy through the death of the beloved. In falling asleep while approaching his beloved's home, the lover betrays his own reluctance to be with Lucy.

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways"

Main article: She dwelt among the untrodden ways

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways" describes Lucy as having lived in solitude near the source of the River Dove. According to the literary critic Kenneth Ober, the poem describes the "growth, perfection, and death" of Lucy. 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 he explores her innocence in the second, when he compares her beauty to that of a hidden flower.

Whether the speaker has declared his love for Lucy is unclear, and the question of whether she was aware of his affection is left unanswered. It is clear that his feelings remain unrequited, for the final lines reveal that his beloved died alone, with her passing largely unnoticed.

Lucy's 'untrodden ways' are symbolic of both her physical isolation and the unknown details of her thoughts and life. The narrator of the poem is less concerned with the experience of observing Lucy than with his reflections on those observations. Throughout the poem sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, a fact emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses. The effectiveness of the final line in the concluding stanza has divided critics, who have variously described it as "a masterstroke of understatement" or as overtly sentimental. Wordsworth's voice remains largely muted; he was equally silent about this poem and others in the series throughout his life. His reticence was often remarked upon by nineteenth-century critics, but they disagreed as to its value and significance. One reviewer, writing in 1853, 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. Her femininity is described in girlish terms, a fact that has drawn criticism from those who see the female icon, in the words of literary scholar 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 if Lucy more resembled the violet or the star, the critic Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994) concluded that although Wordsworth likely viewed her as "the single star, completely dominating [his] world, not arrogantly like the sun, but sweetly and modestly." Brooks considered the metaphor a conventional compliment with only vague relevance. 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 the antiquarian and churchman Thomas Percy's (1729–1811) 1765 collection of British ballads "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 metre, rhythm and structure of the poem. "She dwelt..." 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 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." He compares the opening lines of "She dwelt..." to the traditional ballad "Katharine Jaffray" and notes 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 critic Carl Woodring, "She dwelt..." can be read as an elegy. Woodring views the both the poem and the Lucy series overall as elegiac, "in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death", and finds 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 the 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 travelled among unknown men"

"I travelled among unknown men" was the last of the five "Lucy poems" to be completed and the only one not included in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. While the date of the poem's composition precluded its appearance in that edition, it was not included in two subsequent editions, and did not appear in print until 1807. "I travelled..." was written in April 1801, but Wordsworth claimed that it was composed while he was still in Germany. Evidence for this later date of composition comes from Wordsworth telling Mary Hutchinson, in April, that "I travelled among unknown men" was to follow "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" after referring to "I travelled" as a newly created poem.

The poem has frequently been read as a declaration of Wordsworth's love for his native England and his determination not to live abroad again. The first two stanzas seem to speak directly of the poet's personal experiences, and a patriotic reading would reflect his political perspective at the time. The possibility remains, however, that Wordsworth refers to England as a physical entity, rather than as a political one, an interpretation that gains strength from the poem's identification as a Lucy poem.

Lucy only appearance in the second half of the poem, where she is linked with the English landscape. As such, it seems as if nature joins with the narrator in mourning over Lucy, and the reader is drawn within this mutual sorrow. Although the poem focuses on death, it transitions into a poem describing the narrator's love for England and nature.

'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
 Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
 To love thee more and more. (lines 5–8)

In 1802, instructions were given to Wordsworth's printer to place "I travelled..." 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".

"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 poem describes the relationship between Lucy and nature using a complex opposition of words and sentiments. Wordsworth uses antithetical couplings of words —'sun and shower', 'law and impulse' 'earth and heaven', 'kindle or restrain'— as a device to evoke the opposing forces at work in nature. There is further conflict and opposition between nature and mankind, as both attempt to possess Lucy. The poem thus contains both epithalamic and elegiac characteristics; the marriage described is between Lucy and nature, while her human lover is left to mourn in the knowledge that death has separated from her from mankind, and she will forever now be with nature.

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

"A slumber did my spirit seal"

This poem consists of two stanzas of four lines each, both of which are characterised by the use of spare and economic language. The first stanza is built upon an even, soporific movement in which figurative language conjures a dream-like atmosphere to convey the nebulous image of a girl who "seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years." The second maintains the quiet and even tone of the first but serves to undermine its sense of the eternal by revealing that Lucy has died, and that the calmness of the first stanza represents, according to the critic Boris Ford, "the calmness of death."

Wordsworth's response to the girl's death lacks embitterment or emptiness; he 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 lifeless rocks and stones described in the concluding line are used to convey the finality of Lucy's death and the complete absence of any animating force.

Describing the poem in letter to Thomas Poole dated April 179, 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." In the copy sent to Poole, Coleridge gives 'Epitaph' as the title and 'Mov'd instead of 'Roll'd'.

Interpretation

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 the poet preferred to avoid this interpretation. His poems can seen as lyrical meditations on the fundamental character of the natural world. Wordsworth said that as a youth, nature stirred "an appetite, a feeling and a love", but by the time he wrote "Lyrical Ballads", it evoked "the still sad music of humanity."

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), Landscape, Girl Standing, c. 1826, captures the feeling of rural isolation described in Wordsworth's Lucy series.

The five "Lucy poems" are often interpreted as representing both Wordsworth's 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. 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 (b. 1924), "not so much a human being as a sort of compendium of nature", while "her death was right, after all, for by dying she was one with the natural processes that made her die, and fantastically ennobled thereby."

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 she 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. Regardless, she has become part of the surrounding landscape in life, and her death only verifies the connection she has with nature.

The "Lucy poems" serve as a bridge between poetry of reality and poetry of the imagination. They combine rural themes with mental creations and present nature as both benevolent and malign. To Hartman, 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." There is a negative side to nature, which can seem to be a malevolent force, or at best, oblivious to humanity, and, as Hall argues, "In all of these poems, nature would seem to betray the heart that loves her". Such imagery does not necessarily help the reader's imagination, at least when trying to relate to the events of the poem. Instead, they separate Lucy from reality. As literary theorist Frances Ferguson (b.1947) points out, the "flower similes and metaphors become impediments rather than aids to any imaginative visualization of a woman; the flowers do not simply locate themselves in Lucy's cheeks, they expand to absorb the whole of her [...] The act of describing seems to have lost touch with its goal—description of Lucy."

Death

The poems that Wordsworth wrote while in Goslar focus on either the dead or the dying, and the "Lucy poems" follow this format. Although not the first to point out that the theme of death is intrinsic to understanding the poems, literary critic John Hayden describes the essential nature of the theme when he argues, "The series of early poems known as 'the Lucy poems' also often suggest an absence of demarcation between life and death; and placing them in this context can make the meaning of those often obscure poems a little clearer."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), "Beata Beatrix" 1864–1870, Tate Britain, London. The romantic theme of doomed femininity reached its peak during the Pre-Raphaelite era. This work was painted as a memorial to Rossetti's late wife, Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862), and takes homage from Dante Alighieri's unrequited and lost love Beatrice.

Each poem creates ambiguity between the sublime and nothingness. This is achieved through the poet's struggle to find a manner with which to best 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 remains of her life after she has died. The poems form a rite of passage and, according to Geoffrey Hartman, the "Lucy poems", "center on 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 [Robert] 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 Lucy's death and cries out in "She dwelt..." of "the difference to me!", yet in "A slumber..." he is sheltered from such trauma by sleep and is thus able to view her as a wider part of nature, and to delude himself into believing that Lucy cannot die. In "A slumber...", Lucy is not a real person, but an incorporeal manifestation of nature. The reader's experience of her importance and essence is filtered through the perception of the narrator. Lucy's death serves delivers an awareness that nature can bring pain even to those who loved her. According to the British classical and literary scholar H. W. Garrod (1878–1960), "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." Geoffrey Hartman expanded on this view to extend the view of death and nature onto art in general:

Lucy, living, is clearly a guardian spirit, not of one place but of all English places [...] while Lucy, dead, has all nature for her monument. The series is a deeply humanized version of the death of Pan, a lament on the decay of English natural feeling. Wordsworth fears that the very spirit presiding over his poetry is ephemeral, and I think he refuses to distinguish between its death in him and its historical decline.

If Lucy were intended to represent Dorothy, it is likely that Wordsworth used the specter of her death to allow himself to confront the frustration he felt towards his sister. Nevertheless, a subconscious desire for Dorothy's death caused Wordsworth emotional strain and guilt. The poems are marked with the narrator mourning over the loss of his beloved, while the sense of loss 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, his grief. The narrator's mixture of mourning antipathy is accompanied by denial and guilt. She is physically absent from the narration, and Wordsworth attempts to hide his desires for the death of his sister by describing Lucy as dying from natural causes. 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.

Identity of Lucy

There are many possibilities as to who Lucy was intended to represent. Wordsworth never revealed the basis for the character's formation. Her identity has generated a large amount speculation among literary historians. Little biographical information can be drawn from the poems; it is difficult even to determine her actual age. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas DeQuincey (1785–1859), author, renowned opium-addict and Wordsworth's one-time friend, wrote that the poet,

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.

Critic Herbert Hartman believed Lucy's name was taken from "a neo-Arcadian commonplace" and held she was not intended to represent any single person. In the view of Wordsworth's biographer Mary Moorman (1906–1994), "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 favours the argument that it is possible that Lucy represents Mary Hutchinson. However, Moorman wonders that "If Lucy is Mary, why should she be dead." It is possible that Wordsworth was thinking of a girl who had died, and that this other girl was Hutchison's sister, Margaret. There is no evidence, however, that the poet loved any of the Hutchinsons besides Mary. It is considered likely that Margaret's death is only an influence and not the basis for the character of Lucy.

W. Crowbent, 1907, Portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) depicting her later in life, (drawing from a photograph).

In 1980, author Hunter Davies considered that the series was written for the poets sister Dorothy, and considered it "strange stuff to write about your sister...the Lucy figure in the end dies, which is equally bizarre". Taking the opposite approach, in 1978 literary critic Richard Matlak tried to explain how Lucy could represent Dorothy. He declared that Dorothy represented a financial burden to Wordsworth and effectively forced a separation from Coleridge when she joined them in Germany. After Wordsworth began the "Lucy poems", 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 his separation from his friend, expressed both his love for his sister and through the death of the Lucy character, fantasised about her loss. It is however possible that Wordsworth simply feared her death and did not wish it, even subconsciously.

Further examples of the Dorothy/Lucy interchanging can be found in "The Glow-Worm" and "Nutting". Dorothy's declaration that "Strange fits..." was her favourite supports the theory that she believed the poem to be about her. Wordsworth uses other names for Dorothy in his poetry, though and even another Lucy. The poet 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..." 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.

Reflecting on the importance and relevance of Lucy's identity, the nineteenth-century poet, essayist and literary critic Frederic Myers (1843–1901) observed that

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 the literary scholar Karl Kroeber (b. 1926), "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." Geoffrey 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 Johnston 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!'"

Scholar John Mahoney concluded 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..." 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 literary critic 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." Furthermore, the character of Lucy has importance limited to being only a muse for the narrator. If Lucy is Dorothy, then the poems would focus on how Wordsworth lost the inspiration that he found in her.

However, there is not more emphasis placed 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. The poet's grief is private, and he is unable to fully explain its source. When Lucy's lover 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. Similarly, the twentieth-century critic Spencer Hall, believed the poet represents a "fragile kind of humanism".

Revisions

Wordsworth made numerous revisions when writing the "Lucy poems". The earliest version of "Strange fits of passion" appears in a December 1798 letter from Dorothy to Coleridge. This draft contains many differences in phrasing and completely lacks the "Strange fits" stanza that appeared in the final published version. The new stanza destines the narrative for "the Lover's ear alone", implying that only other lovers can understand the relationship between the moon, the beloved and the beloved's death. Wordsworth also removed from the final stanza the lines:

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.

Benjamin Haydon, William Wordsworth, 1842

This final stanza lost its significance with the completion of the later poems in the series, and the revision allowed for a sense of anticipation at the poem's close and helped 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...", a copy of "She dwelt..." was found with two stanzas which had been omitted from the first edition. The revisions exclude many of the images but emphasise the grief that the narrator experiences. The original version begins with floral imagery, which was later cut:

My hope was one, from cities far,
Nursed on a lonesome heath;
Her lips were red as roses are,
Her hair a woodbine wreath.

A 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."

Critical assessment

The first mention of the poems comes from Dorothy, in a letter sent to Coleridge in December 1798. Of "Strange fits of passion", she wrote, "[this] 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 his friend Thomas Poole (1765–1837), 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 had any reality, I cannot say. — Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die.

The essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) wrote to Wordsworth in 1801 to say that "She dwelt..." was one of his favourite of the Lyrical Ballads poems. Likewise John Keats (1795-1821) praised "She dwelt...". The poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827) merely marked an "X" besides "Strange fits", along with two other poems on the contents page of his copy of Wordsworth's Poems (1815). To the diarist and writer Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), "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."

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". An anonymous review of Poems in Two Volumes in 1807 had a less positive opinion, declaring that "I travell'd among unknown men" was "Another string of flat lines about Lucy is succeeded by an ode to Duty". Critic Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) 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!" Wordsworth's friend Thomas Powell wrote that "A slumber did my spirit seal",

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.

Many of the Victorian critics appreciated the emotion of the "Lucy poems" but focused on "Strange fits of passion"; John Wilson, a personal friend of both Wordsworth and Coleridge, described the poem in 1842 as "powerfully pathetic." In 1849, contemporary critic Rev. Francis Jacox, writing under the pseudonym "Parson Frank", remarked that "Strange fits of passion" contained "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, an early Wordsworth commentator, describes the contemporary perception that "Strange fits..." had a "deep but subdued and "silent fervour". Other reviewers emphasised the importance of "She dwelt among the untrodden ways", including Scottish writer William Angus Knight (1836-1916), when he described the poem as "incomparable twelve lines."

At the beginning of the 20th century, literary critic David Rannie praised the poems as a whole:

that strange little lovely group, which breathe a passion unfamiliar to Wordsworth, and about which he—so ready to talk about the genesis of his poems—has told us nothing [...] Let a poet keep some of his secrets: we need not grudge him the privacy when the poetry is as beautiful as this; when there is such celebration of girlhood, love, and death [...] The poet's sense of loss is sublime in its utter simplicity. He finds harmony rather than harshness in the contrast between the illusion of love and the fact of death.

Later critics focused on the importance of the poems to Wordsworth's poetic technique. Canadian scholar Geoffrey Durrant argued that "The four 'Lucy' poems which appeared in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads are worth careful attention, because they represent the clearest examples of the success of Wordsworth's experiment." Alan Grob (1932-2007) of Rice University focused less on unity that the poems represent and believed that "the principal importance of the 'Matthew' 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 in the history of Wordsworth's thought a more orderly, evolving pattern than the chronological leaps between stages would seem to imply."

Other critics de-emphasise how the poems reflect on Wordsworth's poetic developing as a whole. Hunter Davies (b.1936), concluded that the poems' impact relies more on their popularity than their importance as part of Wordsworth's poetic career. He went on to claim, "The poems about Lucy are perhaps Wordsworth's best-known work which he did in Germany, along with 'Nutting' and the Matthew poems, but the most important work was the beginning of The Prelude." Some critics emphasis the importance behind Lucy as a figure, including Geoffry Hartman {b.1929), when he claims, "It is in the Lucy poems that the notion of spirit of place, and particularly English spirit of place, reaches its purest form." Wrier and poet Meena Alexander (b.1951), believes that the character of Lucy "is the impossible object of the poet's desire, an iconic representation of the Romantic feminine."

Literary influence

The "Lucy poems" have been parodied numerous times since first published. The parodies were intended in part 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 parodies sought to comment in a "meta-critical" manner, and to present an alternative mode of criticism 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 believed Wordsworth's use of the phrase "the difference to me!" was overtly terse, 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."

Not every work referring to the "Lucy poems" is intended to mock; the novelist and essayist Mary Shelley (1797–1851) drew upon the poems within her own works in order to form a basis on what the Romantics thought of the feminine. Works, including The Last Man, draw upon the ideas that, according to Alexander, "provided Mary Shelley with a way of reading, and revising, the Romantic vision of femininity."

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