Lucy

After all this, it becomes a little nerve-wracking that 'Lucy' cannot be neatly labelled. Who was 'Lucy'? A beloved mistress? A well-loved child? A friend? Or a figment of the imagination? Some feel the "poems represent an attempt to give literary expression and distance to Wordsworth's feeling of affection for his sister" , Dorothy? The 'Lucy' of these poems is no celebrity. As the poet concedes in 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways', she was quiet, unobtrusive, living "unknown",

A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

However, Lucy's allure lies in her being the embodiment of Wordsworth's preferred character: solitary, simple, innocent. For William Wordsworth believed that for poetry to continue to please mankind permanently, it had to do with "essential passions" and these were to be found in "humble and rustic life" where they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated

Lucy is also proof of the transforming power of imagination, voiced through Theseus by Shakespeare as well, that Wordsworth was convinced about. This is the power that exalts Lucy into a luminary. In her Wordsworth puts into practice his own advice: "to throw [...] a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect;" Lucy is simple but not crude. She is superlative. In 'Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower', Nature says

A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
In 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways' she is delicate-
A violet by a mossy stone

She is matchless in her exquisiteness -

-- Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

And in 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' she is almost ethereal -

She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

Another facet of Wordsworth the poet emerges in these 'Lucy' lyrics: that of a lover and bard of nature. If "humble and rustic life" allowed the play of elemental emotions, it is also a state in which "passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Inevitably, for a man close to nature who spent hours amidst scenic landscapes, frequently alone, the eye and ear of a lover of nature for detail is evident. Lucy belongs to a world abounding in references to manifestations of nature: Lucy's "cot" under "the sinking moon", the bowers as places of play, the "wayward" rivulet and its murmurings, the "floating clouds" and the turbulent "motions of the Storm". The images of Lucy as a half-hidden shy "violet by a mossy stone", as "Fresh as a rose in June", "sportive as the fawn / That wild with glee across the lawn" are crystal-clear, precise.

Over and above such charming and vivid descriptions, what really stands out is a prevailing 'force' in Nature. In 'Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower', it is portrayed as an "overseeing power" that will nurture and educate Lucy. In her will be inculcated grace, dignity, stateliness, peace and beauty; not overtly but by a process of absorbing "By silent sympathy" these values from "mute insensate things". Lucy, as child and student of Nature, will gain qualities lost in the corruption of urban life. Yet there will be a balance between spontaneous, free play of individuality and control, restraint. Nature intends to be "Both law and impulse" unto Lucy. There is spirituality, a supernatural aspect that is only hinted at. It is more a fusing together of spirits, that eventually becomes literal with Lucy's death when she becomes one with Nature wholly - in mind and body - fulfilling in all ways Nature's wish

This Child I to myself will take,

as Lucy becomes in 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal'

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

For all Nature's beauty and beneficence, there is an underlying threat, a note of impending doom. In 'Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known' the "evening moon" seems to reflect the lover's foreboding. The ride to Lucy's cottage is accompanied more by a sense of anxiety than excited expectancy at meeting a beloved. There is a sense of tragedy throughout that one cannot shake off as one reads the poems. It casts its shadow on happier allusions to Nature and the super-naturalness and sublimity of Nature becomes a double-edged sword with its life-sustaining lighter side and a darker side of death. Invariably, the sense of the latter is strongest in moments more removed from the conscious state - in sleep or in dreams. The presentiment of death as a "fond" thought comes to the lover in an eerie moment of near insanity, and the fact that Lucy has "no motion ... no force" hits home while his spirits are 'sealed' by "slumber".

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In an April 1799 letter, Coleridge wrote of 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal', "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." That just about sums up everything about 'Lucy' in what some consider the pick - and the most cryptic - of the 'Lucy' lyrics: the mystery of 'Lucy', the shadow of death and the sublimity of William Wordsworth's verse.

Meanwhile....I thought your government restricts access to many websites, and that these restrictions applied to Google?