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, the speaker cannot help but wonder what such a young, vibrant child knows about death. When he asks her about her siblings and the total number of children in her family, she replies,
Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother.
Discounting the two dead siblings, the speaker insists that there are only five children total. The little girl maintains that there are seven children total.
Although seemingly focused on death, this poem asserts a life-affirming continuity between the deceased and the living. It employs a few gothic elements, like a focus on death, a...
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connection between dead and living people, a gloomy setting, and a damsel. These last two conventions, however, are inversions of expected gothic characteristics.
The poem’s overarching gothic element is its subject: death. The speaker seems inordinately preoccupied with death; he cannot view a young child without thinking of death. In contrast to the speaker’s morbid fascination, the girl does not shy away or recoil from the subject. She tells him in a matter-of-fact manner that two of her six siblings are dead and buried in a nearby graveyard.
What is especially eerie to the speaker is her continuing relationship with her late sister and brother. A second gothic convention is a strong, supposedly unnatural bond between living and dead people. While the speaker firmly separates the dead siblings from the living ones, the girl still considers them as beings with whom she interacts. The speaker’s conversation with the girl demonstrates the gothic tension between the rational and the supernatural. In the poem, there is an ambiguous border between dead and living. The girl tells the speaker that she often visits her siblings’ graves:
My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
Instead of appearing morbid and disturbed, the girl describes her activities among their graves in a matter-of-fact, upbeat, and affectionate tone. All three siblings keep each other company as she completes domestic chores. She lovingly serenades them and chooses to dine with them; this last act—eating food surrounded by corpses—does seem a bit macabre, but Wordsworth keeps the tone light. The girl mentions that, after the sister died,
together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
The kids play around the grave as if to include the sister; they do not stomp on, desecrate, or hold a séance around the grave.
The third gothic convention is a gloomy setting, typically a dark castle or brooding mansion. Here, the mansion is a rustic cottage located in the same churchyard where the siblings are buried. While living near (or practically on top of) the graves may seem dismal, the girl is content to live with her mother in a cottage close to her siblings’ graves; this way, she can stay near them and easily visit their graves to sew, sing, and eat with them. The late siblings are only
twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
This proximity—while creepy to some—seems comforting to the girl, her sister, and her brother.
The fourth gothic element is the gothic heroine, typically a helpless damsel in distress. Here, however, the girl is decidedly not in any distress, like physical danger or emotional turmoil. She is younger than the traditional gothic heroine but upholds its stereotypical conventions of beauty with a touch of wildness:
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.
Unlike a typical gothic heroine, however, the girl is in complete control of and seems content with her circumstances. She does not need the speaker to save her in any way. In fact, she seems to have a better handle on or acceptance of death than the speaker does.