Who is wordsworths lucy

Submit a letter: Email us letters nybooks. In response to: Romantic Documents from the May 15, issue. Donald H. In his letter to the TLS of December 27, , Reiman wrote: Lyric poems express feelings; dramatic poems depict characters with feelings; analytical poems like some by Donne, Browning, and Stevens analyse feelings.

This Issue June 26, News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks. I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list. 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.

For all Nature's beauty and beneficence, there is an underlying threat, a note of impending doom. 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 Having raised the subject and treatment of it to such an esoteric plane, Wordsworth nevertheless opts for a style and diction closer to the common understanding:.

There may be the heavy, dark side, yet there is euphony. It has to do with the stress and rhyme abab patterns as well as with the choice of language. The language and versification today, read in the wake of twentieth and twenty first century poetic practice may still seem archaic or conventional; but in view of the writing contemporaneous to it the content and its expression are smooth, facilitated by an overall result that is easy, pleasing, truly lyrical.

Wordsworth made a concerted effort to avoid figures of speech such as personifications merely to elevate his style, wishing to "keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him" [10].

The predominant figure of speech remains the simile and all comparisons are to various elements of Nature. Undoubtedly, the effect is not accidental. There is a deliberate craft at play. HE 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!

The poet conveys how her death has separated his life into two different worlds, and the world following her death is completely different. In addition, the poet comes to regard Lucy as the embodiment of everything he loves about England. Following an extended trip to several foreign countries, he realizes how much he loves his home country and vows never to leave again. When he thinks of England, he thinks of Lucy. His homeland and the woman he loved are viewed as one and considered, as a whole, his true home.

In "Three years she grew in sun and shower," nature is personified and has the ability to speak. Nature claims Lucy as a child and in three years transforms her into a beautiful and mature woman.