We Are Seven

Several of Wordsworth's poems in the Lyrical Ballads are concerned with the wisdom of children and the failure of adults to understand them. In "We Are Seven," the simplicity of the vocabulary,...

The poet (or speaker) expresses his emotions and attitudes both directly through narration and indirectly through dialogue and action. The rhetorical question in the first stanza suggests that the...

In "We are Seven," Wordsworth uses the perceptions of an innocent young girl to convey an idea that the death of the physical body is not the end of a person's existence. The speaker runs into an...

Despite both poems being considered lyrical ballads, when read side-by-side, they appear to be very different from one another. Interestingly, they share a common theme: hope. How they portray...

The main idea of Wordsworth's poem "We are Seven" is that the dead still "count", even though they are no longer with us. In the poem, a man approaches an eight-year-old girl and asks her how many...

The key theme of this poem by William Wordsworth is the innocence exemplified in children. The Romantics valued innocence and noticed that it was often the innocent view that was actually the most...

This poem is a perfect example of what Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to do in their groundbreaking work of poetry, Lyrical Ballads. As the "Preface" to this work explains, what they aimed to...

In the first stanza of "We Are Seven," a stanza composed by Samuel Coleridge and added to William Wordsworth's poem, Wordsworth and Coleridge seek to draw a contrast between the little girl's...

In the poem "We are Seven," Wordsworth clearly admires the little girl's faith in the things unseen. The little girl still feels a very physical and spiritual bond with a brother and a sister of...

In "We Are Seven," as in many of his poems, Wordsworth presents children as possessing a kind of primal wisdom which they gradually lose on growing up. In his arrogance, the speaker naturally...

The narrator in "We Are Seven" gets into a good-natured argument with the little maid he meets. The narrator asks the eight-year-old how many brothers and sisters she has, and she tells him, "We...

This poem has the rhythm of what we call ballad meter; this means that it is broken up into four-line stanzas, the first and third lines of which have four stresses or accents per line and the...

In “We Are Seven,” the speaker (most likely a man like William Wordsworth) happens upon an eight-year-old girl in the countryside. He seems to be preoccupied with death. Even when introducing her,...

Wordsworth had a distinct style in which he tried to inspire feeling in the reader by using visual markers to control how the reader read the poem. The poem “There was a Boy” in Lyrical Ballads...

William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven” is built around a contrast between the speaker’s view of death and the views held by a little girl. Among the differences in their perspectives are the...

In William Wordsworth's poem, "We are Seven," the line that is repeated in one form or another is "we are seven." It is repeated twice as "we are seven," and once as "seven are we." Repetition in...

The poem "We are Seven" is about an eight year old girl who is playing among the tombstones in a graveyard, and the poet observes how happily she plays and with how much energy she is invested in...

In the poem "We Are Seven" by William Wordsworth, the poet recounts a conversation he had with a little girl with curly hair. Wordsworth conversationally asks the girl how many siblings she has,...

One of Wordsworth's goals in writing poetry was to compose it in simple, ordinary language that could be easily understood. In "We are Seven," he uses very simple words to convey the story of a...

The imagery used in William Wordsworth's "We are Seven," and Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 both deal with age and death. In Wordsworth's poem, the poet refers often to the images of youth regarding the...

The title is your choice. However, it is important to choose a title that summarizes what you wrote about in the essay. For this reason, it is often best to choose a title after writing the essay....

The poem "We are Seven" by William Wordworth was published in 1798, which makes it a transitional poem from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. As it is common knowledge, high birth...

The little girl with whom the speaker engages in conversation in “We Are Seven” appears to have no real—or perhaps a different—understanding of death. The little girl insists on counting her two...

William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven,” published in 1798, narrates a conversation between an adult speaker and a young girl who tells the number of siblings she has. The poem’s interest and...

It is unusual to begin a poem with a dash, and it is easy to jump over the dash and straight to the words. Therefore, it's helpful to have our attention drawn to this dash so that we can think...

In William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven,” the speaker does not write directly about the home of the “simple Child” that they strike up a conversation with. The speaker tells about the girl’s...

Not surprisingly, this is a complex question. It deals with death and Romanticism, two concepts that might be interlinked to an extent, but both of which are extremely difficult to articulate. In...