We Are Seven (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Wordsworth
- First Published: 1798
- Type of Work: Ballad
- Genres: Poetry, Ballad
- Subjects: Children, Brothers and sisters, Beauty, Death or dying, Lower classes, Afterlife, Life, philosophy of, Life and death
The Poem
“We Are Seven,” written in 1798, is a short poem of sixty-nine lines divided into seventeen stanzas. It relates the story of a narrator meeting an eight-year-old girl who tells him about her family. (According to William Wordsworth, the poem was suggested by a real child he had met near Goodrich Castle in Wales five years earlier.)
Stanza 1 asks a broad question that points to the theme of the poem: What can a lively child “know of death”? In stanzas 2 and 3, the narrator sets the scene. He is presumably walking in the country when he encounters an...
[The entire page is 1438 words long]
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