SOURCE: Eilenberg, Susan. “The Haunted Language of the Lucy Poems.” In Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession, pp. 108-35. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Eilenberg focuses on Wordsworth's “Lucy” poems as they reflect his sense of loss and his relationship to nature and his own poetry.]

The economy of the Lucy poems involves neither property nor, in any obvious sense, possession. It figures no struggle for ground, no exorcism of previous inhabitants. For such loss as these poems record—emotional rather than financial or literary—there can be, it would seem, no recompense. The poems confound both poet's and critics' accounting.

But although issues of property never become explicit here, the economically-worded Lucy poems exhibit the same kinds of behavior and raise the same sorts of issues we have seen in the poems more openly concerned with possession and dispossession. Concerned with the uniqueness of his loss, the poet finds his own words turned against him, his voice usurped upon by its own simulacrum or by silence. Self-reduplicating, autoventriloquistic, and plagued by rivals who are also doubles, the poems generate an uncanniness that looks more Coleridgean than Wordsworthian. They rehearse the formal problems of The Ancient Mariner; they anticipate the difficult dynamics of “Michael” and “Christabel.” But now there seems to be no one within their range to blame or credit for the disturbance of propriety and univocality. This group of poems was not one of the poets' joint projects. Bookless¹ in Goslar, freezing with his sister among a people whose language he had decided he could not learn,² and separated from Coleridge in Ratzeburg by over one hundred miles of frozen German roads and a resolution to save money, Wordsworth must have felt almost as isolated as Lucy herself. The only plausible source of literary disturbance was Wordsworth's own Prelude, then in genesis.

Despite the poems' agonistic behavior, then, the problem seems to be wholly internal, generated by Wordsworth's relation to his own language. It is the power of the Lucy poems to subject the poet to the conditions of his own texts that links them with the uncanniest of Coleridge's poems. The language of the Lucy poems, like that of “Christabel” and The Ancient Mariner, takes possession of its speaker, revealing him to be bound by his own dicta, his poetic freedom straitened by the letter of a text he never meant so literally. Incorporating, like Coleridge's uncanny poems, their own interpretive and literary historical contexts, these poems exhibit a textuality indistinguishable from intertextuality. With his own words suddenly resistant to his attempts at interpretive domestication, behaving as though they came from elsewhere, the poet becomes one of his own characters, overtaken at his desk by his own plot.³

It is these most un-Wordsworthian of poems that carry to its logical conclusion the program Wordsworth avowed in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” employing the smallest possible stimulus to move his readers' imaginations and sympathies. Here as in the other Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth works to produce that “certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things [are] presented to the mind in an unusual aspect,” taking care to keep within the bounds of his newly defined poetic propriety, in which “the feeling … developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling”:⁴

She liv'd unknown, and few could know
          When Lucy ceas'd to be;
But she is in her Grave, and Oh!
          The difference to me.

Seeking to thwart the “craving for extraordinary incident,” the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” that readers accustomed to “sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” might bring to his work, the poet goes far toward purging incident altogether from these poems, turning what might have been a story about the death of a beloved woman into a story about his own awakening from careless contentment into grief.

In his insistence that the real story is internal and perhaps not even really a story at all, the poet of the Lucy poems goes further than the poet of, say, “Simon Lee”; for where in “Simon Lee” there is nothing to tell, in the Lucy poems there is: the poet simply does not tell it. Grief—one presumes⁵—cripples the poet's syntax (“O mercy!” to myself I cried, / “If Lucy should be dead!”) and leaves him effectively speechless. A tombstone would be more informative. Radical understatement, the pathos of the words' helplessness to convey fully the poet's feelings, substitutes for the pathos of Lucy's death and the poet's inability to do anything about it. When the poet does speak at length, the force of vocal inhibition keeps his voice low: “I will dare to tell, / But in the lover's ear alone, / What once to me befel.” Instead of Lucy's struggle to live, the poems offer us scenes of the poet's struggle to speak. But when the force of vocal inhibition manifests itself in the cancellation of whole stanzas, as it does in “Strange fits of passion” (whose final stanza was abandoned) and “She dwelt among th'untrodden ways” (which lost its first and third stanzas), it exceeds its dramatic justification. Wordsworth does not merely impersonate a taciturn lover; he suffers the censorship he wields.

Like the rest of the Lyrical Ballads, the Lucy poems leave conspicuous room for voices other than that of the poet. They leave room particularly for the reader, who is invited to supply his interpretation in place of the story the poet refuses to tell. Narrative and syntactic fragments, the Lucy poems depend upon their readers' interpretive efforts to fill them out. What we are asked to interpret in these texts is itself an act of interpretation in which the poet reads his own words as if they had been spoken by another. The poet makes himself out to be only the belated interpreter of what are, after all, his own poems. He calls upon the reader to aid him against, or perhaps merely to witness, the stranger he discovers in himself, his own internal poetic rival, who speaks a language the poet recognizes as foreign—as indeed, in Goslar, it was.

The Lucy poems demonstrate almost programmatically the axioms of the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”; they also epitomize its problems. What Wordsworth describes in the “Preface” is an experimental redefinition of the borders of poetry in such a way as to include everything vital and exclude the artificially sensational. He seeks to marry the language of art to the language of life. But the Lucy poems discover in that theoretically purifying and hypothetically revivifying connection only confusion and death. The meeting of the two languages, that of the unselfconscious man and that of the self-conscious poet, is catastrophic. Describing in the “language really used by men” a dead woman “Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees,” the Lucy poems show with terrifying literalness how “the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” Following to the letter the prescriptions of the “Preface” intended to ground poetry in the common and the familiar, the Lucy poems fall, ironically enough, into a gothicism even ghostlier than the one Wordsworth meant to avoid.

Each Lucy poem is only a synecdoche of the same occluded narrative of loss, repeating what we already know from hearing it not quite told by the others. They inhabit what Geoffrey Hartman calls “the ghostly interstices of narrative,”⁶ haunted not only by Lucy but also by the ghost of her story. Read collectively, they suggest a narrative whose outlines, like those of any respectable ghost, are hazy: we cannot tell exactly where it begins, what it includes, or where it ends. We know there are a number of Lucy poems, but we do not know exactly how many because we cannot tell what counts as a Lucy poem and what does not.⁷ Although critics are fond of arranging the poems in sequences,⁸ it is no use deciding that “Strange fits of passion” must go first when one can't figure out whether “I travelled among unknown men” belongs to the sequence or whether “Louisa” could be a member of the group traveling under an alias. Part of the difficulty arises from Wordsworth's failure to treat the poems as members of the same family or to distinguish them in any formal way from their neighbors. Four of what we now think of as the Lucy poems were printed in the second volume of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads: “Strange fits of Passion,” “She dwelt among th'untrodden ways,” and “A slumber did my spirit seal” were sandwiched between “Ellen Irwin, or the Braes of Kirtle” and “The Waterfall and the Eglantine.” Readers of the time may have imagined “Ellen Irwin,” a slight ballad-like poem about a girl who dies for her lover, to be the first and most intelligible of a short sequence of poems on the tendency of amiable young women to die. They may not have connected these poems with “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” which appeared further on in the volume. When Wordsworth collected and classified his poems in 1815, the Lucy poems suffered a fresh dispersal. “Strange fits” and “She dwelt” were printed side by side in “Poems Founded on the Affections,” between “Louisa” and “I travelled among unknown men,” both of which have been linked to the Lucy group. “A slumber” and “Three years she grew” went together into “Poems of the Imagination,” flanked by “O Nightingale!” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” neither of which has ever been considered a candidate for inclusion among the Lucy poems.

Like most readers, I take “Strange fits of Passion,” “She dwelt among th'untrodden ways,” “A slumber did my spirit seal,” and “Three years she grew” to be the central Lucy poems; I omit “I travelled among unknown men” partly because it does not appear with the others in the Lyrical Ballads. Deciding to accept the conventional grouping is a matter of convenience, not conviction; although it is impossible to draw precisely the borders of the group, it is equally impossible to talk about them without making some gesture in the direction of any such demarcation. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the blurring of the poems' identity is one of their chief characteristics and an effect Wordsworth worked to create, not only by scattering them, not only by leaving Lucy sometimes anonymous, but also by providing the poems with delusive doubles.

Of these doubles “Lucy Gray” is perhaps the most notorious. Both “Lucy Gray” and Lucy Gray function as literary ghost effects, afterimages of the proper Lucy poems. Surely undergraduates are not the only ones beguiled by the similarities between this Lucy and the other. “Lucy Gray” seems at first glance to offer an explanation of what the other Lucy poems leave so mysterious: So this is what happened! So this is what she was like! But it is finally as difficult to grasp the meaning of this girl as of the other. Lucy Gray the ghost, like “Lucy Gray” the poem, comes into being as the residue of desperate interpretation, what is left after her parents have traced the “print” of her feet to the middle of a bridge:

          downward from the steep hill's edge
They track'd the footprints small;
And through the broken hawthorn-hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;
And then an open field they cross'd,
The marks were still the same;
They track'd them on, nor ever lost,
And to the Bridge they came.
They follow'd from the snowy bank
The footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank,
And further there were none.

By continuing beyond the print, “Lucy Gray” provides its heroine with an afterlife, which is, perhaps, the only life ever available to her. For in some sense Lucy Gray was already, even before her loss, a ghost; her inability to cross the bridge, to cross water, should have told us as much. Her body is never found because there is no body to be found; the only thing anyone can recover is that textual “print,” which leads her parents and us to that blank space in which the other Lucy, too, died.

“Lucy Gray” supplies an aetiology for the ghostly melancholy of the central Lucy poems; it tells a story about what it is like to look for a girl who has fallen out of the text and thereby eluded interpretation. If she could be found, she could be mourned; but what blocks mourning blocks understanding as well. Not her death but rather her elusiveness binds this poem to the other, less overtly baffling, Lucy poems, whose interpretive frustrations the curiously extratextual ghost of Lucy Gray epitomizes.

The literal corpselessness of “Lucy Gray” corresponds to a figurative corpselessness in the proper Lucy poems, whose blank, practically nameless heroine hardly seems real enough to die. We tend to think of life as capable of representation and death as beyond language, but Lucy's life was the impossible figure for her death. As Frances Ferguson points out, Lucy exists largely as a cypher and an occasion for metaphor-making:

The similes and metaphors are figural substitutions for Lucy which stand in for Lucy completely enough to suggest that there may be a fundamental category mistake in seeing her as a human being—she is, perhaps, a flower (or a simile, or a metaphor).⁹

It is not altogether clear that a girl who is a flower (or a simile, or a metaphor) can die at all, except figuratively. The poet takes care to erase from her representation any traces of genuine humanity she may have begun with,¹⁰ and the facts of her death are studiously evaded. Although no body is ever explicitly missed, none is ever pronounced dead, either. It is always in the interim that Lucy dies: between one poem and another, between one stanza and the next, even (as in “A slumber did my spirit seal” or “Three years she grew”) between an innocent image and its horrified deciphering.

Although we know she must be mortal, Lucy hardly seems susceptible to anything so punctual as death. While she lived, “She seem'd a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years,” and while he is with her the poet seems to share a like immunity from anxious time. “A slumber did my spirit seal,” he tells us, and he does seem to have enjoyed, while she lived, an extraordinary kind of temporal exemption, inhabiting, grammatically speaking, the subtle gap between the temporally imprecise imperfect, the tense of habitual and familiar truths, and the preterite, the tense of discontinuities, discrete events, and narrative. When in “Strange fits of passion” an abrupt awareness of the progress of the moon leads him to imagine Lucy's death, he is unable face the possibility that her death could occur as a dying:

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head—
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”

His subjunctive transforms what might have been an event into a condition, a capacity for death, something he must already have known about her. “If Lucy should be dead!” he cries, as if perhaps she had already died without his having realized it, or as if her death occurred somehow outside of time. But she isn't dead, at least not yet. A false alarm, a premature apprehension, distracts us from the imminence of the real thing.

This is the closest the poet comes to showing us the death itself, and he can do it only by presenting it as imaginary. Although by the time the reader moves on from this poem to any of the others the fiction will have been revealed to be true, an atmosphere of unreality clings to Lucy's nonstory. As Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out, it is as if her death were something that existed only within the poet's mind, an invention of his consciousness.¹¹ The poet has a curious emotional investment in the esoteric knowledge of her death:

She liv'd unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceas'd to be;
But she is in her Grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.

The “difference” is so fine as to be nearly impossible for anyone else to register, and that, from the poet's point of view, is as it should be. His attitude seems a compound of doubt and jealousy: doubt that she really is dead, and jealousy lest others declare themselves his rivals in mourning her.

Such feelings would not be as inappropriate as they may sound. Freud describes the “work of mourning” as a slow accession to the reality of a loss that the mourner would gladly deny. In his reluctance to give up the beloved dead he may

[cling] to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged.¹²

Before the mourner manages to free his ego from its attachment to the dead, then, he is liable to see ghosts, whose appearance express his doubts about the reality of his loss and who seem to want to draw him into the grave with them. If he is to return to living in the living world, however, he must detach himself from the dead. Peter Sacks observes,

Few elegies or acts of mourning succeed without seeming to place the dead, and death itself, at some cleared distance from the living. Hence, in part, the sense of distance marked by the processions in elegies or by such related items as the catalogued offering of flowers. These offerings, apart from their figurative meanings and their function of obeisance, also add to the temporal or spatial respite within the rites, or within the poem itself; and the flowers, like the poetic language to which they are so often compared, serve not only as offerings or as gestures for respite but also as demarcations separating the living from the dead.¹³

In Sacks's words again, “The work of mourning … is largely designed to defend the individual against death.”¹⁴ The mourner mourns to save his own life; he must distinguish himself from the object of his grief and affirm his kinship with his fellow mourners, the living. But neither may he altogether renounce his ties with the dead, lest he be forced to renounce their legacy to him.¹⁵ At the same time as he breaks either identification—with the other mourners or with the object of their mourning—he must reassert it, proving in the face of rival claimants his right to inherit, proving against the claims of the dead his right to live.

As an expression of the work of mourning, then, elegy is fundamentally a contest or struggle simultaneously against the dead and against the mourner's living rivals. The mourner finds himself involved in an emotional triangle whose dynamics recall those of the Oedipal triangle whose resolution first permitted him access to language. Thus Sacks:

Each procedure or resolution is essentially defensive, requiring a detachment of affection from a prior object followed by a reattachment of the affection elsewhere. At the core of each procedure is the renunciatory experience of loss and the experience, not just of a substitute, but of the very means and practice of substitution. … In the elegy, the poet's preceding relationship with the deceased (often associated with the mother, or Nature, or a naively regarded Muse) is conventionally disrupted and forced into a triadic structure including the third term, death (frequently associated with the father, or Time, or the more harshly perceived necessity of linguistic mediation itself). The dead, like the forbidden object of a primary desire, must be separated from the poet, partly by a veil of words.¹⁶

If successful, mourning makes it possible for the mourner to name and figure the dead. Elegy brings poetic voice to birth at the side of the grave and at the expense of deathly silence.

Although the Lucy poems have sometimes been called elegies, they are not good—or at least not successful—examples of the genre. As bad elegies, the Lucy poems worry the work of mourning rather than accomplishing it. They refuse to confront the moment of death or the fact of the body; they fail to distinguish between what is inside the grave and what is outside it. Unable to forget Lucy, sometimes unable to name her, and incapable of providing credible witnesses to her death, the poet convinces us chiefly of his bitterness at having lost the girl to what sounds suspiciously like another suitor. With such a chief mourner, no wonder Lucy remains a ghost.

The difficulty of mourning was much on Wordsworth's mind during the winter of 1799-1800. He made it the subject not just of the Lucy poems but also of the so-called Matthew poems, two of which appeared in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads along with the four principal Lucy poems. Both the Lucy poems and the Matthew poems are abortive elegies, poems in which a man fails to detach himself from those he has lost and turn again to the living.¹⁷ In both groups poetic voice—making analogies, creating figures—generates fears of treacherous substitution or rivalry. The poet must bite his tongue or whisper as he goes; it is dangerous to speak in the vicinity of the dead.

The most obvious similarity between the two groups¹⁸ has to do with the nature of the sorrow that is their subject. In none of these poems is grief open to comfort; in all of them the sense of loss remains fresh and repels all efforts at consolation. The passage of time has no healing emotional significance in these poems. In “The Two April Mornings,” Matthew remembers the pain he felt grieving for his daughter thirty years earlier:

Six feet in earth my Emma lay,
And yet I lov'd her more,
For so it seem'd, than till that day
I e'er had loved before.
And, turning from her grave, I met
Beside the church-yard Yew
A blooming Girl, whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew.
A basket on her head she bare,
Her brow was smooth and white,
To see a Child so very fair,
It was a pure delight!
No fountain from its rocky cave
E'er tripp'd with foot so free,
She seem'd as happy as a wave
That dances on the sea.
There came from me a sigh of pain
Which I could ill confine;
I look'd at her and look'd again;
—And did not wish her mine.

Though momentarily tempted by the resemblance between the passing girl and his lost Emma, Matthew refuses to succumb to the consolations of confusion; he will not allow anyone but Emma to be his daughter. The shape of his grief retains a strict integrity.

No substitutions, no consoling figurations, are possible for Matthew, not even for children who never existed. In “The Fountain” he laments not for his lost daughter, nor indeed for anyone in particular except, perhaps, himself; his grief has become anonymous but not therefore any easier to remedy. He complains of a grief so general it has become mere melancholy:

“My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
My life has been approv'd,
And many love me, but by none
Am I enough beloved.”
“Now both himself and me he wrongs,
The man who thus complains!
I live and sing my idle songs
Upon these happy plains,
And, Matthew, for thy Children dead
I'll be a son to thee!”
At this he grasp'd his hands, and said,
“Alas! that cannot be.”

The old man's dead will suffer no rivals. The sense of absorption we find here we find also in the Lucy poems, but the literalness of his grief is Matthew's own. Not for him is the poet's carelessness about the identity of his beloved; this man knows whom he has lost. The dead are not allowed to return in any shape. No “Emma Gray” lurks in the margins of these texts. But if the Matthew poems seem written in repudiation of rivals, revenants, and fictional doubles, they nevertheless stand in relation to the Lucy poems, like “Lucy Gray,” in precisely the position of rivals, revanants, and doubles.

The Matthew poems and “Lucy Gray” form a ghostly poetic corona around the central Lucy poems, blurring the hardness of their edges and suggesting that Lucy may not be as distinct a figure nor her death as distinct an event as the speaker assumes. Against these unspoken insinuations the poet offers passionate but confused defense. Choking on his own voice, he insists upon the uniqueness of his loss, his frequently demonstrated taciturnity becoming, over the course of what for lack of a better word one might call the cycle, an irrepressible loquacity. But the more he insists, the more troublesome grow our doubts.

The poems' very multiplicity creates problems. Long and repetitious elegies we are used to—elegiac repetition is conventional, Sacks notes, and frequently “elegies are presented as being repetitions in themselves.” The very length of an elegy says something about the difficulty of coming to terms with the death of someone beloved: the repetitions tend to create a sense of ceremonial continuity in the face of mortal discontinuity, and the iterations help persuade the mourner that his loss is real.¹⁹ If the Lucy poems were the stanzas of a single larger elegy, we might understand their function in this light; for the terrible amplitude even of “In Memoriam” one can imagine excuses. But the Lucy poems, though not so wearyingly numerous as Tennyson's laments, are perhaps harder to justify because harder to integrate. The poems do not admit of addition, indeed of accumulation of any kind. There is no sense that they represent distinct moments in a process of mourning; between one poem and another there is no sense that the past has receded or the poet moved forward. On the contrary, the poet is unable to progress; he is forced, like the Ancient Mariner, to relive his loss and repeat his dismay. Things have changed and can never again be the same, he cries; but the iteration belies the cry. The time is always only an undifferentiated and static afterwards. Each poem, refusing to acknowledge the others, presents itself as the first, the only lament.²⁰

As a result, the poems form a rivalry rather than a sequence or even a group. The structure of rivalry not only determines their relations to one another and to other poems standing proximate to them (“Lucy Gray,” the Matthew poems) but also informs their emotional content. The poet sees rivals in death, in Lucy, and in himself. His grief is superimposed upon jealousy and self-doubt; he cannot always be sure who it is that he mourns or even who he is that finds himself mourning.

The rival the poet fears does not generally take the form one might expect.²¹ He is rarely visible and not indubitably human. We surmise his existence because the poet does: he acts as if he has a rival and is willing to sacrifice a great deal in order to be able to repel the threat the rival poses; he is willing to sacrifice even Lucy herself.

Compared with the extravagance of the conventional elegy's praises, invocations, and offerings to the dead, this poet's gestures in Lucy's direction appear strangely grudging. Unlike the ordinary elegist, who calls upon nature to mourn and the dead to return to life, this poet seems to want to disperse the mourners and remind Lucy that there is nothing worth coming back for. Her life itself was nothing much—as the poet describes it, something between a quibble and a paradox. In “She dwelt among th'untrodden ways” Lucy was

A Violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
—Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky!

It is oddly half-hearted praise. The poet seems to suggest that Lucy was most beautiful when she was a little hard to see or at least when there was no one else around—that she did not stand up to comparisons well, or even direct inspection.

All this redounds, of course, to the credit of her modesty. But the lover's enthusiasm for his beloved's tendency to shrink from view suggests a desire to shield not only her but also himself from competition. Twice in the course of this brief poem he falls into awkwardness as he tries to deny the possibility that other men might notice her.

She dwelt among th'untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

It is possible to make sense of this, but only at the price of acknowledging that those few who love Lucy do not admire her. It is possible, too, by means of logical acrobatics, to make sense of the final quatrain:

She liv'd unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceas'd to be;
But she is in her Grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.

When the poet says she “liv'd unknown,” he does not mean it literally; it is the proximity of the second iteration of the word “know,” used literally, that creates the initial confusion. But why so awkward? The thought that others may admire her drives him to overstatements that he is forced to retract. Judging by the logical and linguistic strain, one would be tempted to say that what threatens him is not so much her loss as the competition it seems to demand of him.

The poet catches his first glimpse of the competition in “Strange fits of passion,” during a hypnotically slow ride toward Lucy's cottage one moonlit night.

When she I lov'd, was strong and gay
And like a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath the evening moon.
Upon the moon I fix'd my eye,
All over the wide lea;
My horse trudg'd on, and we drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reach'd the orchard plot,
And, as we climb'd the hill,
Towards the roof of Lucy's cot
The moon descended still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And, all the while, my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse mov'd on; hoof after hoof
He rais'd and never stopp'd:
When down behind the cottage roof
At once the planet dropp'd.

It is like a problem in geometry. If we forget the horse for a moment, we find a triangle, with the poet on the ground, Lucy's cottage some distance away, and the moon up above. The triangle changes its shape as the poet rides on and the moon progresses across the sky, and finally, as the moon sets behind the cottage, it collapses. How we read the poet's bizarre response to this collapse (“O mercy!” to myself I cried, / “If Lucy should be dead!”) will depend upon what we make of the triangle—and what we make of the moon. The most immediately obvious thing about the moon is its longstanding association with lunatics, of whom the poet may be one. The second most obvious thing about it is that the poet begins to confuse it with the human object of his quest.²² Riding towards Lucy's cottage, he rides also toward the moon, his horse seeming to leave the earth behind as “hoof after hoof / He rais'd and never stopp'd.” We cannot know whether the poet has begun to identify the moon with Lucy or whether he has allowed it to distract him from his thoughts of her, whether his moonstruck journey means fidelity or betrayal or (Endymion-style) both at once. But when the moon converges on Lucy's cottage and disappears, suddenly he imagines the girl has died.

If the moon is somehow Lucy's counterpart or rival, it is the poet's as well. It keeps pace with him, as the moon always does with a traveler, accompanying him as he heads toward Lucy's cottage, only descending as he ascends. Its movement reflects his movement; it is he; only, in beating him to his goal, this double becomes a rival, as doubles are wont to do.²³ The object of his desire and his narcissistic identification, his ideal self and the idealization of Lucy, turns out to be also the object of his envy. Its eclipse suggests simultaneously the success of a rival, the death of that rival, the death of his beloved, and the extinction of his double. The poet's instant and instinctive fears for Lucy's life must express even more terrifying fears for his own life, but only the threat to Lucy can be articulated. The complex nature of the doublings within the triangle allows the poet to survive the lunar menace: he can offer up Lucy as a sacrifice in his own place. One double seems to destroy the other. All that is clear is that in this poem both love and identity are inextricably involved with erotic triangularity—something we already knew from Freud.

The symbolic threat of the moon in “Strange fits” is the threat precisely of the symbol, of language even, with its tendency to set itself up in rivalry not only against its representations, the objects of its desires or significations, but also against its speaker, its desiring and intending subject. To speak is to betray oneself; the rival most to be feared shows himself as soon as one opens one's mouth in protest against him. Perhaps this is why the poet whispers; perhaps he really is afraid of the sound of his own (or is it his own?) voice. Each Lucy poem, like either Matthew poem, encounters death as a revelation of the rift between representation and desire. In the Lucy poems this disjunction is the source, apparently, of a consciousness the poet will not acknowledge as his own but that speaks through his words. In these poems the loss of individuality that death threatens comes in the form of vocal substitution. The poet experiences Lucy's death as a difficulty in saying what he means to say about her. His own voice shocks him.

In “A slumber did my spirit seal” we encounter a configuration similar to that we found in “Strange fits.” The geometry of this shortest and most shocking of the Lucy poems involves a triangle involving the poet and two doubles: Lucy and an invisible but audible figure that turns out to inhabit the poet's own words.

A slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force
She neither hears nor sees
Roll'd round in earth'd diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees!

While Lucy was alive he had no need to think precisely about what she was. She was at once too ambiguous and too unambiguous: too changelessly herself to need a name, which implies the possibility of alteration or absence, and too much a part of the poet's own “I,” which is also a “she,” to warrant a separate term of identification.

On the other side of the white space the poet's unconsciousness has become Lucy's. As if his self-consciousness, his awareness of himself as distinct from Lucy, has required the most absolute of distinctions between them, his waking up means her death. Or, since Lucy never is treated as a character independent of the poet's consciousness, his awakening into self-consciousness is the equivalent of feeling as if someone had disappeared whose separateness he had never before noticed.²⁴ His “I” will no longer shade off into “she.” Lucy, meanwhile, has been diffused into all external nature, no longer distinguishable from “rocks and stones and trees,” as she takes on herself the burden both of the poet's earlier unconsciousness and his implicit belief in her—which means also his—immortality. The question whether the “she” of the third line refers to “my spirit” as its antecedent thus becomes irrelevant: either she carries off the threat of death by suffering it herself or else her continued existence in nature confirms how right the poet was to suspect that “she” was immune to change.

The poet's thoughtless innocence has become guilt, for his dream provided the literal terms of Lucy's death. Midway through the poem, between the first stanza and its uncanny mirror-image in the second stanza, the imagination is brought face to face with its imaginings. The horror of the second stanza depends upon a combination of the ironic and the uncanny. It is ironic that the poet's calm confidence in Lucy's immortality should have been betrayed so subtly, that death should turn out to have entered through a legalistic quibble or loophole. It is uncanny that his earlier thoughts and innocent words should return to him with a meaning he never meant. From the perspective of the second stanza, the first is haunted; when the poet speaks them it is something else that means them. What haunts the first stanza is literalness of a peculiarly reductive kind. The images of the first stanza seem, upon first reading, to stand on their own, plain enough, in no pressing need of interpretation. The second stanza arrives as the literal meaning that shifts the first stanza, as the poet and we are now uncomfortably aware, into the realm of the figurative, which we had not taken seriously enough. Lucy's death, which occurs as the metamorphosis of one kind of language into another, coincides with the self-interruption of the poem as it stops to interpret itself, to quote its own words in a new context that reveals the split between conscious intention and meaning. Here language itself is Lucy's ghost and the poet's deadly rival.

In “A slumber,” as in “Strange fits” and “She dwelt,” the poet is a latecomer in his own poem, arriving at the truth too late to rescue Lucy from his own Doppelgänger, which is also hers. The companionable moon or his own dreamy words betray him, leaving him not only bereaved but also obscurely guilty. He spoke the words that prophesied Lucy's death, and he followed the moon that killed her. His desire to keep her invisible to the world meant the end of her. In the last-written of the Lucy poems, however, the poet is blameless, a passive witness to the crime his rival commits. He does not speak, or ride, or wish; he merely quotes. For the first time, the rival shows himself for what he is: not a verbal parasite, not an ambivalence, not an optical illusion, but a powerful figure with a history and a voice of his own, before which the poet can only give way.

In “Three years she grew” the voice of Nature usurps the poet's control over his poem, interrupting him after only a line and a half and not letting him speak again until it has destroyed his subject.²⁵

Nature is not what people who think of Wordsworth as a “nature poet” might expect. It is not just that this Nature speaks; nature frequently speaks in Wordsworth, but not usually in discrete or iterable words, and not usually as through a prosopon.²⁶ This Nature, an oddly articulate and thus oddly unWordsworthian character, presents himself as the linguistic creature of an earlier literary tradition—the same branch of tradition inhabited by Chaucer's Nature, regulator of avian matings in The Parlement of Foules; Spenser's Nature, epicene judge of Mutabilitie in The Faerie Queene; and Proteus, worker of metamorphoses, embodiment of allegory, greatest of ventriloquists.²⁷ He is also King of the Underworld, his opening words—

A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take,
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own

—suggesting echoes of the Persephone myth, filtered perhaps through Paradise Lost:

                    Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers
Her self a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.(28)

Daughter of Eve and Persephone,²⁹ the product, like Nature, of origins more literary than natural, Lucy listens—or fails to listen—while Nature sings an erotic invitation in the tradition of the Passionate Shepherd.³⁰ Wordsworth's Nature offers Lucy a more radical version of the innocent Marlovian pleasures “That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountain yields.” But unlike Marlowe's Shepherd, Wordsworth's swain does not admit the lady's right to refuse; there is no possible Wordsworthian “Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd.”³¹

Nature never deviates very far from what an earthly lover might say to his mistress. Much of his language can be understood in terms of reverence and a desire for union; in his fond imagination, Lucy becomes a mythic creature, and he sees her against backdrops both picturesque and beautiful. But his courtly and amorous fancies tend toward an ambiguity of expression in which it is possible to imagine, at least momentarily, sinister possibilities. Take, for instance, the second stanza:

Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse, and with me
The girl in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.

What is Lucy doing “in rock and plain”? Has she been buried? Is she now a spirit? However disturbing the image that the phrase conjures, and whatever its meaning, the next few words buffer its power to shock, reinterpreting the rocks and earth of the “rock and plain” as an image of terrestrial life under the auspices of the divine. And having thus casually dispersed the odor of the chthonic and displayed Lucy at liberty in the upper world, Nature at last locates her in the places one would expect to find wooable maidens: glades and bowers. The darker implications now seem figments of a morbid imagination; except perhaps to the reader of Ovid or Spenser, glades and bowers hold no terrors.

Such is the pattern of much of what Nature says. His words slide between the covertly threatening and the courtly, but the shifts are subtle enough to make it hard for the reader to pin down anything in particular as sinister; Nature takes his own shady images and reinterprets them in terms either more conventional or less disconcertingly intelligible. When Nature tells us

The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her, for her the willow bend,

we cannot know whether he means a compliment (she is like the wind, and the very trees bow in worship of her), whether he is elaborately saying that even the “mute insensate things” of nature feel her glory, or whether he has in mind something less courtly than bizarre, Lucy's evaporation and the weeping of the willow, that funereal tree (“Sing willow, willow, willow”). Oddly enough, the literal sense—what the individual words taken seriously seem to suggest—comes across as more fantastic, more highly figurative, than the familiar or conventional figurative sense. The poem forces us to confront a human-sacrificial aspect of the apparently harmless language of courtship, making us think about the uncanny underpinnings of thoughtlessly conventional language.

While there is something threatening in the language Nature uses or parodies, the threat is veiled. The force of Nature's invitation is not immediately evident. His lines, composing a mere catalogue of delights, bespeak the happy contemplation of his desires: if he can win Lucy's love, they will be one in spirit, joyful and serene. His intentions, moreover, are honorable; he has in mind not so much a seduction (“This Child I to myself will take”) as a marriage (“While she and I together live / Here in this happy dell”). And the future he describes—a future that instantaneously achieves perfected bliss without the bother of working toward it—seems to involve no pressure, not even that of sequentiality. The lack of temporal indicators (“first,” “next,” “then,” “finally”) and the fact that, within Nature's speech, stanzas 2, 3, 4, and 5 could be read in any order suggest that Lucy's choice will entail no binding consequences:

Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse, and with me
The Girl in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs,
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her, for her the willow bend,
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her, and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

Lucy may choose from his prospectus, and after choosing she may choose again. Or so it seems.

But the delights Nature lists are not options, and it is not for Lucy either to choose them or to refuse. The sense of his proposals is that Lucy yield up her will and her identity. “My self will to my darling be / Both law and impulse,” he declares, the lover's conventional desire to become one in spirit with his beloved revealing itself, in Nature's formulation, to be an ambition rather more radical and less gentle than mere erotic identification. The natural and the human will converge. Lucy takes on attributes of fawns, clouds, weather, the stars, and streams; and Nature (or, perhaps, merely lowercase nature) takes on attributes of human consciousness: law, impulse, restraint, grace, sympathy. According to Nature's scheme, the beloved internalizes her lover, who has come to reflect her inner being, taking his will—if it is his will—for her own. Perhaps for this reason there is no need for her to reply to Nature; it is impossible that she should have an autonomous voice.

In the process Nature describes, Lucy is not merely the object of Nature's will because she is also its manifestation and its source; she absorbs the will that works upon her and that makes the plans that Nature reveals. She shares Nature's power even as she is subjected to it. Dwelling “in rock and plain, / In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,” she haunts the ground, moves the clouds, causes the trees to bow. She might be a genius loci, if only one could locate her precisely enough. But one cannot. She diffuses into the abstract landscape:

          she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

Though the secret places and the rivulets may be particular and literal enough, the place shows itself to be subtly allegorized in these last two lines. In allegory it would not be impossible, as it is in the kind of reality Wordsworth is accustomed to depicting, for an abstract quality like “beauty” to detach itself from its context (here the sound of the murmuring rivulets) and take up residence in some new context, here Lucy's face. Lucy's situation is Spenserean (or even Coleridgean); what we take to be her spiritual condition is manifested in the landscape and figures around her. As Nature says, she cannot

          fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.

Lucy sees into the life of things, but in an oddly reflexive way. Looking out into the storm (like the Ancient Mariner catching sight of the specter ship), she beholds the contagious image of herself and her future.

But if this is allegory, it is an improper or at least an uninterpretable one. Wordsworth's landscape is not to be read in quite the same way as is one of Spenser's or Coleridge's; there is no one to tell us what the woods are named or what happened once by the rivulets. The history of this landscape is suppressed or non-existent. These scenes, which have not yet received their names, are as yet pre-allegorical, merely Ovidian. There must be a metamorphosis before there is a myth. But is there a metamorphosis, or only a misapprehension?

Lucy starts out human, and it is not at all clear when she ceases to be so. At our last glimpse of her, which comes in Nature's deceptively urbane closing prophecy, she seems indubitably girlish:

And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell,
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell.

We find ourselves returned, if only momentarily, to the familiar world in which little girls do get bigger and can be said, in terms that everyone recognizes and understands to be dictated by convention, to be reared by delight. It seems clear that Nature is just being poetical, as he was when he told us that Lucy “shall be sportive as the fawn,” as he was even when he told us that “A lovelier flower / On earth was never sown.” Though we may not have an altogether precise understanding of what he means, we feel fairly certain that we know the basis of his comparisons, or at least that these are comparisons. There really do exist girls who remind their friends of fawns or flowers.

But the analogues that would make such understanding possible are not always available. The finite distance from literal sense that marks properly figurative language widens to infinity; metaphor shades off into catachresis. What can be the literal sense of Lucy's feeling “an overseeing power / To kindle or restrain”? How can one feel a power of sight? Is Lucy the wielder of this power or its object? What does the power kindle or restrain—or is the overseeing power itself to be kindled or restrained?

As a creature of words, Lucy lives in the space of these ambiguities, inhabiting the curiously timeless interval between literal and figurative, surviving for as long as Nature speaks—however long that is. She dies—for us, at least—at the moment the poet reclaims his voice:

Thus Nature spake—the work was done—
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene,
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.

The poet's words force an immediate reevaluation of what Nature has been saying. Is Lucy's living together with Nature merely a trope for her dying into nature? Could Nature have meant what he said, that Lucy would “live” with him, and is her death the aftermath of this romance and not what Nature has been talking about so subtly all along? Or did she die in the poet's reductive interpretation of Nature's words?

In the poet's presentation, Nature's speech and Lucy's life both go by in an instant. “Thus Nature spake—The work was done—/ How soon my Lucy's race was run!” Nature's words, as the poet perceives them, have an almost divine force.³² Our “narrator” makes do with an impoverished role; he provides the scaffolding for Nature's speech and a contrast with that highly wrought and powerful voice. The “narrator's” version occupies only a few lines and seems, in comparison, starkly literal: “She died” either as a result or a translation of Nature's imperative (for that is what it is, not an invitation or a prophecy).

Compared to Nature, the narrator comes across as the lesser poet. His voice is small, ineffective, helpless before clichés. His few poor phrases (“the work” that “was done,” “what has been, / And never more will be”) are as vague as they are reductive. “How soon my Lucy's race was run!” Nothing brings the dead metaphor to life; we had not thought of Lucy running a race (against Nature, against time) before, and we do not think of her that way now; it is the poet, not the girl, who has been running, and so fecklessly that until he introduces himself at the end as an “I” and lets us know that he has lost “my Lucy,” we do not even know he is there. The poem makes the poet—who speaks but refuses to use his own language, who borrows clichés and depends upon Nature's words to give his own meaning—extraneous. For the first time in all the Lucy poems, the little the poet has to say is too much. Nature has usurped his voice as fatally as he has Lucy's.

But to say that Nature is the poet's more powerful rival is to pretend to more certainty than is possible. It is not clear whether Nature gets into the poem because he is too powerful for the poet to keep out or because the poet has sponsored his appearance; here as in the other Lucy poems, the distinction between rival and double is not easy to make. The poet presents himself as an ordinary man who sees nature in terms of “sun and shower,” “this heath, this calm and quiet scene”—nature demythologized,³³ that is, rather than nature in the tradition of Spenser. Talking Nature seems to intrude here from a different kind of poem and a different kind of literary sensibility; he is not the kind of figure the poet would be apt to see or imagine or be likely to use as a means of expressing what he saw happening to Lucy. His function in the poem is to say the vaguely lulling things that in the other Lucy poems come out of the “slumber” that seals the spirit or the “sweet dreams” that the poet experiences. Elsewhere it is the poet himself, albeit in a half-awake state, whose odd dreaminess figures so ironically; here the responsibility for those sinister intimations of Lucy's mortality belongs to Nature. Nature, then, speaking like a character from the far past of the literary tradition and in the form of the shady, magic-working poet/prophet, speaks from the place formerly occupied, perhaps, by the poet's subconscious but, further back than that, by other poets. The poet's own thoughts, too strange and menacing for him to acknowledge as his own, come out of the mouth of a character apparently as unlike him or any of his own creations as possible.

Even this is an oversimplification, because it forgets about Lucy, who is here and throughout the Lucy poems not merely the victim of some obscure rivalry or ambivalence but in fact the rival's double just as she is the poet's. She is an aspect of the poet's soul—“an intermediate modality of consciousness,” as Hartman calls her, whose death “brings a new consciousness to birth.”³⁴ She represents the paradoxes of romantic self-consciousness, with its unnerving suggestions of a split in consciousness and language. The ambiguities of Lucy's otherness engender anxieties about the poet's identity: she symbolizes both his integrity and his division, his comforting wholeness and his possible fragmentation. Her existence both confirms and undermines what it doubles, hence the effect of simultaneous splitting and convergence. Like Geraldine, Lucy allegorizes the problems of allegory, language that has become subversive of what it is supposed to represent. Her presence in the poems is the effect of shifting and unnarratable rivalries among representations and their ostensible objects. Her life is ambiguity, double voicing, and uncertain reference; nomination and interpretation kill her. The poet's dreams of her death—dreams he typically denies having dreamed—reflect both his wishes and his fears, for she is both vulnerable and vaguely sinister, both threatened and threatening; to possess her is to possess a rival, and to lose her is to lose oneself. Subject and symbol of fragmentation, she is dispersed among rocks and stones and trees, a violet and a star, plains and glades and bowers and storms. Subject and symbol of identification, she converges with the powers—the moon, Nature—that disperse her.³⁵

The Lucy poems reveal the uncanny potential of the language Wordsworth praised in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”:³⁶ the real language of real men, language that, in theory, derives its propriety from the beautiful and permanent forms of nature and the similarly beautiful and permanent forms of human character. Wordsworth needed no special linguistic resources to bring Lucy into being or to create in these deliberately unsensational poems an effect as sensational as that of the gothic works he abhorred. All he had to do was not show his heroine dying, not grieve wildly over her grave, not give way to extravagance of language. Refusing to give voice to impropriety, he finds his voice stolen from him and used to express meanings he cannot own. The repressed power of improper or unowned language speaks through his reticence, haunting his language and shattering his character.

To find Wordsworth involved through the most orthodox of Wordsworthian principles in an autoventriloquism evidently Coleridgean raises a question or two about the presence and necessity of Coleridge in Wordsworth's program. If ventriloquism is truly a mark of Coleridgean influence, why did it manifest itself just now, when, as we noted earlier, Wordsworth was living apart from Coleridge in what amounted to linguistic isolation? What literary ether need we hypothesize in order to explain the transmission of a Coleridgean disturbance through the vacuum?

If what disturbed Wordsworth was not Coleridge himself exactly but rather his absence, we wouldn't need any ether at all. While I do not go so far as seriously to propose Coleridge as the secret original of the “Violet by a mossy stone / Half-hidden from the Eye,” I would suggest that the terrible baffled ambivalence Wordsworth expresses in these poems—the sense of betrayal, uneasy yearning, jealous confusion, and guilty vocal impotence—is what one might expect him to feel at finding himself separated from the friend whose imagination, ear, and voice he had become accustomed to using almost (but this, we have seen, could be a problem) as if they were his own. The Coleridgean quality of the Lucy poems, their ventriloquial likeness particularly to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Christabel,” might be explicable in part at least as evidence of a precisely Coleridgean bereavement,³⁷ an attempt to recover through internalization that ideal uncanny other who functioned simultaneously as rival, as object, and as second self.

In fact, however, it was Coleridge who languished (poetically speaking) in Germany, while Wordsworth thrived. In the Goslar poetry—including the beginnings of what would become The Prelude—Wordsworth began to create a myth of autonomous imaginative self-generation and to repudiate his dependence on Coleridge.³⁸ Although not quite happy at being so far from his friend, Wordsworth discovered in himself a source of inspiration that might compensate for what he missed. He learned to distinguish between Coleridge and the abstract position or possibility Coleridge happened to embody in Wordsworth's imaginative life, an imaginative potential that would continue to function regardless of its external realization, representation, occupation, or even vacation by another. Apart from Coleridge, Wordsworth began to apprehend the impersonality of the imagination and its usurpations, which represent no necessarily external disturbance but rather its endlessly self-bereaving and self-recovering nativity.

Goslar was not the end of the Wordsworth-Coleridge collaboration. The poets would return from Germany and to one another. The publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) was still before them; so were the odes, the failure of the Recluse scheme, the trip to Malta, the growing mutual disappointments and disillusionments. There was still over a decade to go before the bitter quarrel over Wordsworth's betrayal of Coleridge to Basil Montague and the long estrangement that never quite healed again. Goslar was only a brief and friendly interval in a still strong and productive friendship. But it prepares us to understand how the poets would work later on, when their isolation from one another was real, enforced by resentments and not merely by geography. The Lucy poems give us a foretaste of the genuine mutual bereavement to come and an indication of how that loss would revise the poets' understanding of the place and function of imagination when its impersonality and abstraction were no longer mere speculative hypotheses but painful social realities.

Notes

1. “As I have had no books I have been obliged to write in self-defence,” Wordsworth writes, presenting two Lucy poems and a fragment of The Prelude (EY, #105, 14 or 21 December 1798, p. 236).

2. “My hope was that I should be able to learn German as I learn'd French, in this I have been woefully deceived. I acquired more french in two months, than I should acquire German in five years living as we have lived. In short sorry am I to say it I do not consider myself as knowing any thing of the German language.”

   (EY, #110, 27 February 1799, p. 255)

3. To say this is to say more than that the poet seems to be speaking in his own person. Despite the best efforts of the sleuths, we cannot with any certainty identify Lucy with anyone Wordsworth knew or connect these poems with any documentable loss. My point is formal rather than biographical: both individually and as a group (the structure of the group recapitulates the structure of its member poems), the Lucy poems refuse to be contained.

4. This evasion of narrative in the Lucy poems and in the other pieces written at Goslar has led James Averill to comment, “Elegy, particularly as Wordsworth practices it, is suspended between narrative and lyric. It does not choose to tell a story that gives emotional significance to the poem, yet the knowledge of death informs thoughts or incidents that would be trivial without it. … [T]hese unremarkable events are part of a larger, sadder tale. Such a consciousness of mortality takes the place of the consecutive plot of tragic romance” (Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980], p. 207).

5. Some readers, however, have taken the poet's stiff-lippedness as an indication that perhaps he is not grieving so wholeheartedly after all. See, for example, Richard Matlack, “Wordsworth's Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 93 (1978), 46-65, for the argument that Wordsworth's ambivalence toward his sister's presence at Goslar feeds into the ambivalence of the poems.

6. Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History,” in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 186.

7. See Hugh Sykes Davies, “Another New Poem by Wordsworth,” Essays in Criticism 15 (1965), 135-65.

8. See, for example, Heather Glen's fine reading of the poems in Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's ‘Songs’ and Wordsworth's ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 286-87.

9. Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 175.

10. Ibid., p. 176, and Douglas H. Thomson, “Wordsworth's Lucy of ‘Nutting,’” Studies in Romanticism 18 (1978), 287-98.

11. See Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 158-60.

12. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), XIV, 244-45.

13. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 19.

14. Ibid., p. 16.

15. Sacks compares the traditional elegiac contest to ancient funeral games, where “the winners exemplify and seem to immortalize the qualities of the deceased, or at least those virtues deemed important for the community's survival. … [I]n Greece the right to mourn was from earliest times legally connected to the right to inherit” (pp. 16, 17).

16. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

17. The Prelude, begun that same winter, is a more complex example of a similar problem, a poem in which most of the poet's life and the deaths of those closest to him go practically unacknowledged. Its posthumous publication brought to life the voice of a still young man speaking to his still living friend Coleridge and his still sane sister Dorothy. The half-century of revision that preceded its publication merely solidified the poet's refusal to acknowledge the facts of time, death, and madness. It is a refusal to mourn spoken from beyond the grave.

18. “The Two April Mornings” offers us the memory of a dead girl, an Emma rather than a Lucy; the man who mourns her is the poet's aged friend rather than the poet himself. “The Fountain” involves no girl at all; its grief is impersonal. Both poems are, nevertheless, members of what John Danby calls the “larger [poetic] complex” that contains the Lucy poems (John Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems 1797-1807 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960], p. 88).

19. Sacks, The English Elegy, pp. 23, 24.

20. Although by removing the original conclusion to “Strange fits of Passion” Wordsworth established that poem as the beginning of the story whose conclusion the other poems supply, what follows does not amount to a narrative.

21. For a reading of the Lucy poems' triangularity in which the reader occupies the third vertex, see William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 96-102.

22. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 159.

23. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, translated by Yvonne Freccero (1961; trans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Girard has in mind human doubles and rivals; here in Wordsworth the rival seems to be language itself.

24. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, pp. 157-60.

25. There are other instances of the poet's devoting most of a poem to quoting one or more of his characters. “The Brothers,” for example, ceases temporarily to be a narrative and behaves like a drama; much of “Hart-leap Well” is in the voices of Sir Walter and the Shepherd; and Matthew's voice occupies much of “The Fountain” and “The Two April Mornings.” But in all these poems the autonomy of the quoted voices is qualified to some extent by the poet's voice, which frames them or comments on them in such a way that we are reminded that the poem after all belongs to him. In the Lucy poems our faith in the poet's verbal control is undercut as we see his words turning against his conscious intentions.

26. Ferguson, Language as Counter-spirit, p. 189. Individual natural objects sometimes make fanciful speeches (“The Waterfall and the Eglantine,” “The Oak and the Broom”), but they do not speak as Nature.

27. Theresa M. Kelley discusses the relationship between the figure of Proteus and attitudes toward traditional allegory in “Proteus and Romantic Allegory,” English Literary History 49 (1982), 623-52. In the Renaissance, Proteus, whom the Roman poets had known as ambiguus, served as a figure for the lawmaker, the lawbreaker, the prophet or artist, the deceitful magus, the maker and destroyer of concord, and the violator of sexual norms (A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea God in the Renaissance,” in Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr., eds., The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968], pp. 443-44). He sometimes served as a figure for “mutable nature, specifically the cycle of the seasons, in particular winter which overwhelms beauty” or as “a personification of matter” (A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene [London: Longman, 1977], p. 380n. Hamilton is commenting on Proteus's abduction of Florimell in III. viii, an episode resembling the rape of Persephone by Dis). Wordsworth's Nature is nothing if not ambiguous, a maker of fiats, a breaker of human bonds, a prophet, a maker and destroyer of concord, a virgin-violator, a creature of subtle and shifting words—very much like Proteus.

28. Paradise Lost, IV, 268-72.

29. See Carl Woodring, Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), p. 46, and Irene H. Chayes, “Little Girls Lost: Problems of a Romantic Archetype,” in Northrop Frye, ed., Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1966], p. 76.)

30. Most critics assume that Wordsworth's Nature is female, a queen thinking of adopting a maid-in-waiting or a Demeter-figure who somehow receives her Persephone-figure daughter instead of losing her. (See, for example, James G. Taaffe, “Poet and Lover in Wordsworth's ‘Lucy’ Poems,” Modern Language Review 61 [1966], 178; and Chayes, p. 76.) But the voice we hear is not feminine and definitely not maternal. Ferguson describes Nature in this poem as a “child molester” and insists, “It is not a benevolent mother, but rather a Plutonic male” (Language as Counter-Spirit, pp. 188, 189). Although it may seem frivolous to argue about the gender of an allegorical figure consisting of nothing more than a voice, it seems important to do so here because of the way it affects our reading of the poet's response to Lucy's death. His response will be different if he believes he is losing Lucy to a sexual rival or to a foster-mother. It may be that his feeling is itself confused, as it seems to be in “Strange fits of passion,” but even in confusion or ambivalence choices may be distinct.

31. Nature here diverges considerably from his Chaucerian and Spenserian forebears, who functioned as judges and regulators of other creatures' passions, who heard pleas and arguments presented, and who engaged in dialogue with other figures.

32. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 159.

33. Ferguson, Language as Counterspirit, p. 191.

34. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 158

35. This convergence, erotic but also semiotic, may explain the ambiguities about the gender of the moon in “Strange fits” and Nature in “Three years she grew.”

36. Speaking of “Strange fits of passion,” Barbara Johnson remarks, “The strange fit depicted in the poem can in some sense be read … as the revenge of personification, the return of a poetic principle that Wordsworth had attempted to exclude. The strangeness of the passion arises from the poem's uncanny encounter with what the theory that produced it had repressed” (A World of Difference [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], pp. 96-97).

37. That Coleridge did figure in Wordsworth's imagination at that time as dead is suggested by the fact that, as Reeve Parker remarks of another poem begun in Goslar, “Coleridge heard The Prelude as an elegy for himself, an elegy he had helped shape” (Coleridge's Meditative Art [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975], p. 221). But see note 17.

38. Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 165-94; Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 170-71, 186-99.

Frequently Cited Texts

BL: Biographia Literaria, Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

CPW: The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. 1912; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

EY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805. Edited by Ernest De Selincourt, revised by Chester Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

LY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years. Part I, 1821-1828; Part II, 1829-1834; Part III, 1835-1839. Edited by Ernest De Selincourt, revised by Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-1982.

MY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years. Part I, 1801-1811. Edited by Ernest De Selincourt, revised by Mary Moorman. Part II, 1812-1820. Edited by Ernest De Selincourt, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 1970.

Prose Works: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

STCL: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1971.

STCN: The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. 3 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957-1973.

WPW: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. 1940-1949; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-1959.