Wordsworth's Poetical Works Summary and Analysis of

 

A slumber did my spirit seal

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In the first of the poem's two stanzas, the speaker declares that a "slumber" has kept him from realizing reality. He has been in a dream-like state, devoid of any common fears ("human fears"). To the speaker, "she" (his unnamed female love) seemed like she would never age:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

 

In the second and final stanza, however, we learn that she has died. She lies still and can no longer see or hear. She has become a part of the day-to-day course of the earth:

 

No motion has she now, no force:

She neither hears nor sees,

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees.

 

Analysis

"A slumber did my spirit seal" is one of Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems," which focuses primarily on the death of a young woman named Lucy (though she remains unnamed in this poem). Many scholars and literary historians have offered theories as to who Lucy was, but her identity remains a mystery.

The poem is comprised of only two four-line stanzas, and yet a great deal happens in this narrow space. We see the speaker's realization not only that this young woman has died, but also that bad things can happen in a beautiful world. In the first stanza, the speaker is innocently unaware that age can touch a woman, but he is quickly taught a harsh lesson when she dies between stanzas one and two. The choice to hide the death between the stanzas is interesting, as it seems to imply that the speaker is unable to verbalize the pain that goes along with the sudden loss.

On the other hand, the poem may be less about the speaker's innocence than about his belief in the young woman's power. Indeed, he seems to have built her up in his mind into a goddess, untouched by age and mortality. This desire to keep her perpetually young is a testament to the speaker's feelings for the young woman.

In the second stanza, Wordsworth offers an eerie description of the woman's current situation. She is blind and deaf--wholly incapable of taking in the world around her. This is a particularly painful idea in Wordsworth's poem because he is generally so focused on experiencing the senses. The speaker also mentions that she is now without motion or force. This, of course, is true of all dead people, but by stating the obvious the speaker helps the reader to imagine the way the young woman once was: full of life and vigour.

In the last two lines, the speaker describes the young woman trapped beneath the surface of the earth. In fact, she has become a part of the earth, rolling with it as it turns day to day. The very last line of the poem is especially interesting because the speaker lists both rocks and stones, which are essentially the same. It may be that he intends to reference both gravestones and common rocks. Alternatively, the speaker may intend to emphasize the "dead" things of the earth over living things like trees (which are mentioned only once).

"A slumber did my spirit seal" is a ballad, though a very short one. The stanzas follow an abab rhyme scheme, and the first and third lines are in iambic tetrameter, while the second and fourth lines are in iambic trimeter.

 

‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’ by William Wordsworth is one of five “Lucy” poems that Wordsworth published in the volume Lyrical Ballads, which he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These pieces are all focused on the idealized love of a speaker for a girl by the name of Lucy. In this piece, she is not named, but her story remains the same and the speaker is faced with her premature death for which he was unprepared.

“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” is a short two-stanza poem, made up of two quatrains, or sets of four lines. The stanza is simple in its formation and follows the rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD. The rhythm and syllables of this piece are also constant. The second and fourth lines of each stanza contain six syllables, while the first and third contain eight.

Summary of A Slumber did my Spirit Seal

“A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” by William Wordsworth tells of a speaker’s realization that his beloved is not immune to the ravages of time.

The poem begins with the speaker describing how up until now his “spirit” had been sealed off. His mind and soul had been protected from the realization that his love, Lucy, was going to be subject to ageing, just like everyone else. Because he never actively acknowledged this fact he lived without “human fears.” His lack of fear made him unprepared for the shock of reality when his love died.

It had seemed to him, while she was still alive, and his spirit was in that trance-like state, that Lucy could not “feel / The touch of earthly years.” Time could not affect her as it does everyone else. This illusion was shattered.

The second stanza of the poem speaks of this realization. His love now has “no motion” or is forced to move through the world. Additionally, time and death have taken her sight and hearing from her. Aging has done to her what it does to every other living thing and she has become a true part of the earth. Just as the “rocks, stones, and trees” change with time, so now, the speaker sees, does Lucy.

Analysis of A Slumber did my Spirit Seal

Stanza One

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

 

The speaker of this poem begins by describing a state that he has been living in for an extended period. Some have proffered the idea that the speaker is Wordsworth himself, but when this poem is taken into consideration with the other four “Lucy” poems, it is perhaps more likely the speaker is a persona with which Wordsworth closely relates.

At the beginning of this short but complex narrative, the speaker states that he has been consumed by a “slumber.” His “spirit” has been sealed up in a trance-like state that has kept him from seeing the truth of the world. Blinded by his idolized love for “Lucy,” who remains unnamed in this piece, the speaker has disregarded basic elements of life and death.

While in this trance he has “no human fears.” He did not acknowledge or worry about the things that most humans, especially lovers, do. The speaker did not think of an end to the relationship, or the possible aging and death of his beloved. These are going to surprise him, and he is going to describe them as the poem continues.

It had “seemed” to the speaker, while his “spirit” was sealed up, that his love, Lucy, was immune from the “touch of earthly years.” She was to him, so beyond the realm of normal human women, that it was impossible to even fathom her death.

Whether he truly believed this to be true, that his beloved could not age, is not clear. Either way, he was unprepared when confronted with the truth.

Stanza Two

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

 

In the second stanza, the speaker is forced to come to his senses. He sees that she has died and regards her as now having “No motion.” She does not have the “force” that she did previously; to move her own body, or to wield the same power over him that she did when she was alive. That does not mean that he is unaffected by her death. He is surprised and shocked by the change in his circumstances.

He speaks further on her new condition, saying that now she is unable to either “hear [or] see.” The “earthly years” have taken these senses away from her and have confined her to death. He now recognizes that she is, and always was, a part of “earth’s diurnal course.” She is impacted and changed by the daily progress of time, just like anyone else.

Now, she has cemented her place within the Earth and is holding an even more important spot in its progression. She is “Rolled round” in the Earth and has become one, physically, and spiritually, with the “rocks, and stones, and trees.” Just as they do, she ages, and just as she does, they make up the foundation of the Earth.

About William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, England in 1770. He met with early tragedy in his young life as his mother died when he was only seven years old and he was orphaned at 13. Though he did not excel, he would eventually study at and graduate from Cambridge University in 1791. Wordsworth fell in love with a young French woman, Annette Vallon while visiting France and she became pregnant. 

The two were separated after England and France declared war in 1793 and Wordsworth began to develop his radical ideology. Soon after, Wordsworth became friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the two co-wrote, Lyrical Ballads, which contains some of the most well-known poetry from both writers.

Wordsworth’s radical ideas did not last as he aged and by 1813, reunited with Vallon and their child, he moved to the Lake District. He continued to create poetry, although his most productive period had passed until is death at 80 in April of 1850. He had held the position of England’s poet laureate for the last seven years of his life.

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal by William Wordsworth: Summary and Analysis

'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' is the greatest of the Lucy poems composed by William Wordsworth and probably one of the greatest in the English language. This brief elegy on Lucy belongs to that group of exquisite lyrics, which are collectively known as 'Lucy' poems. The keynote of this poem is immortality. In only eight lines, Wordsworth conveys, with absolute conviction, intensity and compression, the whole of the human situation posed in 'Three Years She Grew', and the whole of the concept of Lucy as integrated with nature.

In the first line, he refers to a 'slumber' which sealed his spirit. Wordsworth refers to sleep and slumber when he is thinking of something quite different to the normal meaning of these terms; at times he seems to mean spiritual peace, but here equally he seems to mean unawareness, and this is reinforced by the second line 'I had no human fears. The next two lines explain that Lucy had seemed to him a 'thing' that could not be touched by the passing of time, 'The touch of earthly years.'

The second stanza is a contrast to the first, in that the poet now shows how Lucy was touched by time and death and now lacks 'motion' and 'force', both ideas associated with positive human action. Now she 'neither hears nor sees'; all those special marks of humanity are gone. That is, Lucy has been absorbed into nature. She is now one with the rocks, stones and trees and part of the greater pattern of the universe.

The poem possesses an absolute simplicity of tone, style, rhythm and rhyme. The diction, likewise, is simple, except for the word 'diurnal', which contrasts with those around it and helps to lay stress on the heavy, blow-like rhythm of the final line, where both the finality of the poet's loss and the totality of Lucy's absorption is reinforced by the rhythm.

In this poem the girl Lucy has reached the farthest point of disembodiment. She is not even a violet or a star; she is nothing as tangible or visible even as those two inhuman objects. The poem does not say that she had died; there is no factual statement of that kind. She is defined wholly by negatives; that is, we do not know who she was or what she was, only that she is no longer. She is nothing; she sees nothing, she hears nothing, she cannot herself move, she is beyond time, unchangeable, eternal. 

And yet, at the same time, she does moves; she is not motionless, she moves with the movement of the whole world, as it turns in space, and this movement she almost seems to feel certainly the poet feels it for her. The poem does not even say that she is in the grave, though this is what one tends to assume. Perhaps she, like the poet, is in a trance. For he too is in a slumber, carried beyond ordinary 'human fears'; he has no regrets, no anxieties, and he feels himself turning slowly, as though he has lost his own strength and his own right to action, as though he has become a rock or a stone or a tree.

 And yet, at the same time, trance is not like death. We do not feel that the poet and Lucy are as dead as stones; the effect of the poem is to make us feel that stones and trees are alive and that the daily turning of the earth is a positive, living movement, not a mere mechanical rotation. This highly complex notion, characteristic of Wordsworth's attitude to the natural world, is expressed with amazing power and with a complete absence of any philosophical or intellectual argument.

 The poem has perfect unity. Every word in it is extremely simple and indeed common, with one interesting exception ‘diurnar’ which is the only word in the poem with more than two syllables. It is the only literary word in the piece, and it is used with great care and effect. The heavy rolling of its syllables suggests the rolling of the earth, as the more usual word 'daily' could never have done, and Its very unexpectedness adds immeasurably to the weight and gravity of the poem. Wordsworth does not overdo it; a poem full of words like 'diurnal' would be merely pedantic and artificial, but the use of one such word, accompanied by the bare dignity of 'rocks and stones and trees', is extraordinarily musical and suggestive. In his sparing, careful use of such long and rhythmic words. Wordsworth, at his best, is with Shakespeare. The combination of sound and sense is a sign of the greatest poetry.

The genesis of these poems has remained a mystery. We do not know who this Lucy Gray was. The question of whether Lucy Gray was a real girl, or she was the creation of the poet's fancy, has been the headache of many a scholar. This poem is an elegy to Lucy. In this poem, he speaks about the exquisite charm, beauty, vitality, and gaiety of Lucy who was 'Nature's darling'. Wordsworth, whether genuinely or imaginatively, loved this girl very much. She was the source of great joy and inspiration to the poet and it is through Lucy that he makes Nature speak of herself.

The poet says that when Lucy was living, he was so lovely, fresh and full of vitality that he could never for a moment think that she will ever die. Her personality used to work like a drug on the poet's mind and the girl used to appear to him immortal. Her charm and loveliness were enough to devoid him of his reason.

A slumber or sleep or state of unawareness sealed off the poet's spirits, and kept him, in other words, from a normal awareness of the realities of life. In this state of unawareness, he had no human fears. What he means by human fears is suggested in the last two lines of the first stanza; the use of the colon after fears indicates that the clause that follows will amplify or explain the preceding clause. Lucy seemed to be someone who could never grow old. The poet, then, had none of the fears that human beings have about the possible death of their loved ones: he had no human fears. 

But the line also means that he had no fears about his beloved as a human being, the word human being ambiguously used in the second line. The effect of the ambiguity is twofold: the poet's not having any of the fears that human beings normally have made his love impressively enveloping and all-engrossing, and the poet had no fears for his beloved as a human being enables us to see her as the poet sees her as a being who transcends the ravages of time, a being so perfect that the poet needs to have no fears for her. But in the second stanza, Lucy is dead: she has no motion and no force; she does not hear, nor does she see. 

She has become an inanimate part of the earth as she is rolled around with rocks, stones, and trees in the daily revolution of the earth. Much of the impact of the poem depends on the shocking contrast between Lucy in the first stanza a being of eternal youth and the dead Lucy in the second stanza. Compressed into eight short lines is a concept of love that has the power to take a lover beyond the confines of reality until he sees his beloved as perfect and immortal. There is also the shock of realizing that despite his love the beloved is subject to death and is, indeed, now merely like rocks and stones and trees without a will, without power, lost in the daily turning of the globe.

The word slumber has the connotations of light, pleasant steep; it differs from sleep in that its very lightness removes any suggestion of death with which sleep is often enough equated. Were the poet to have said that sleep sealed his spirit, the suggestion of death might have been too powerful to counteract in subsequent lines. His spirit, his consciousness of reality, however, is sealed or shut off from reality by a light and pleasant sleep in which he has no human fears. The initial connotations, then, are not of death, but of the entirely pleasant state of slumber untroubled by fears of any kind. The absence of fear is emphasized by the metrical structure of the second line: ‘I had no human fears.’

 

Similarly, Lucy seemed a thing; normally, we use the word thing to describe an inanimate object, but here it is used to describe so animate an object that it is immune to the touch of earthly years: it cannot die since it will not grow old. In the second stanza, the whole irony of the diction of the first stanza becomes apparent. Death is the essence of the second stanza, and the merest suggestion of it in the first line of the poem becomes a dominant reality in the second stanza. In the second stanza, Lucy has indeed become a thing of no motion, no force. Subtly, then, the two stanzas, though dealing with two sharply contrasted ideas the first with the intense kind of love and the second with death are nevertheless linked through the diction of the first stanza which foreshadows on a secondary level the content of the second stanza.

The fourfold negation of life for Lucy in the second stanza---she has no motion, no force, no sight, no hearing not only serves to emphasize Lucy's death, but it also suggests the total impact of the knowledge of Lucy's death on the poet. It is as though he can grasp the whole meaning of death only part by part: grasping the whole all at once would be overwhelming. The last two lines of the poem emphasize again the complete lack of animation that characterizes death: Lucy is equated with rocks and stones and trees. Paradoxically, although she has no motion, she is rolled around. The paradox, too, serves to emphasize her lack of animation; she is the powerless thing to which motion is imparted by the turning of the earth.

An experience of great intensity has been communicated through a short and essentially simple lyric. Our total response is not one of paralyzing grief as we realize that the beloved is dead. We are made to think and to feel; we are shocked; we are aware of a fundamental irony of life; we realize the power of grief and even feel grief, and we respond to the structure of the poem, the arrangement of its various elements, and its beauty. For a few brief moments, all our consciousness has been focused on the various elements of a moving and meaningful experience. All of this has been done to us through the eight short lines of a simple lyric but a lyric of great compression producing a response of great intensity.

This is one of the famous so-called Lucy poems by William Wordsworth, that capture the life of the child Lucy who died during her childhood and never reached adult years. Even though this is quite tragic, at the same time, to Wordsworth there is a fascination with this figure and the way that children in his mind represent a clear connection with nature that enables them to be more in tune with the natural world and all its mystical wonder than with the world of humans. Lucy, by dying young, never lost this connection, whereas most humans lose it when they become adults.

Critical Appreciation

Therefore, the sibilance in the opening line of the poem with the repetition of "s" seems to create a rather dream-like, other-worldly feel to it. Lucy, when she is contemplated by the speaker, is a figure who seems separate and remote from human experience as she is a figure who cannot experience the "touch of human years."

The final stanza reflects on her early death and the way that she has no sight or hearing. However, what she has not lost is that connection to nature, as, although she is dead, she is part of the cycle of nature and "earth's diurnal course" as she is "With rocks, and stones, and trees." Interestingly, the poem doesn't mention the word death which perhaps indicates the speaker's feelings about Lucy and her connection with nature. She has not "died" in the traditional sense to him, because she is still very much part of the natural world.

Summary and Analysis

 “A slumber did my spirit steal,” by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), is one of the briefest of all the most famous poems in the English language. But the poem has also been the subject of some of the most intense critical debate. This text, perhaps because it is so short, has often been used as a test case in various critical arguments, especially arguments about the theoretical approach known as “deconstruction.” Much of the debate turns on how to interpret the poem’s final lines.

It seems best, however, to postpone the discussion of the major debate until we have first examined some of the poem’s more straightforward features. Thus, no one can deny that the opening line strongly emphasizes alliteration: “A slumber did my spirit seal.” Likewise, assonance appears in “did” and in “spirit.” The opening line, then, seems particularly “musical” or “lyrical”: its sound effects are quite pronounced. The meaning of the line seems simple: the speaker could sleep soundly; he was at peace in a way that he will (according to some interpretations) still feel at peace by the end of the work. Other interpretations, however, suggest that by the end of the text, his peace has been disrupted. In either case, the first line is significant in relation to the last line: the first line either foreshadows the peace of the conclusion or is contradicted by a concluding sense of pain.

The second line is especially intriguing, mostly because of the adjective “human.” Lack of fear is one thing, but why is the word “human” needed? Isn’t this word redundant? Aren’t all fears felt by humans “human fears”? Is “human” simply a synonym for “common”? If so, why doesn’t the speaker use the word “common” (which is, after all, the word commonly used to suggest “common”)? Is the speaker implying the existence of some larger, less usual, more significant fears? Already, then, the poem begins to raise questions. Was the speaker merely clumsy in using the word “human,” or is something more interesting going on? Is the speaker, for instance, already beginning to emphasize some distinction or at least some relationship between the human and the non-human? At this point in the poem, no certain answers to any of these questions seem possible.

An even more puzzling question arises in line 3 in the use of the word “She.” To whom or what does this word refer? Some readers assume that a real human being is the subject of this pronoun. Others assume that “She” refers to the mysterious “Lucy,” the subject of so many other poems by Wordsworth. Yet if “Lucy” is the referent of “She,” why does the speaker not simply mention her name explicitly, either in the poem itself or in a title? Why, in fact, does the poem have no title? 

Is it possible (as one critic has suggested) that the word “She” refers not to any person but, instead, to the speaker’s “spirit” (1)? Once again, then, the poem raises questions in ways that its apparently simple phrasing and structure might not have led us to suspect or predict. The meter of the opening stanza, for instance, is completely regular: it does not deviate at all from an “iambic” beat, in which odd syllables are unaccented but even syllables are stressed. Similarly, the line lengths are completely symmetrical: lines 1 and 3 contain eight syllables each, while lines 2 and 4 both consist of six syllables. The rhythm, shape, and generally clear phrasing of the poem, then, suggest that its meaning will be simple. Already, however, the text has begun to raise puzzling questions that seem to conflict with its apparently straightforward structure and its (for the most part) seemingly straightforward diction.

Nevertheless, the first stanza seems far simpler than the second. The first stanza suggests that someone or something (either a mysterious female, Lucy, or the poet’s spirit) was at rest and at peace. 

Yet the very fact that the speaker tells us this and that he uses the past tense raises the troubling possibility that such rest or peace has subsequently been disrupted. It is in stanza two that the nature(s) of such disruption(s) are addressed.

Significantly, the second stanza begins with the word “No” (5), and negations are stressed throughout the first two lines. Whomever or whatever the word “she” refers to, that “she” now has “No motion” and “no force,” and “She neither hears nor sees” (5-6). Suddenly the tone of the poem has darkened considerably; peace has been replaced by loss and disturbance. 

If the word “she” refers to a woman (such as Lucy), then presumably the woman is dead. If the word “she” refers to the speaker’s spirit, then presumably the speaker somehow feels dead inside (an implication that would also follow from the other possible meaning of “she”). The loss, in either case, seems complete: “She” not only no longer has movement but has also lost two of her most important senses the two (hearing and sight) that provide our most common means of access to the rest of the world. “She” thus seems dead either literally or (if the word “she” refers to the speaker’s spirit) metaphorically. 

It is the final two lines of the poem, however, that have proven most controversial and most difficult to interpret with any genuine certainty. The “she” is now

 

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, stones, and trees.

 

Are these lines optimistic or pessimistic? Are they consoling or disturbing?  Do they express the speaker’s pantheism (the idea that humans and nature are one)? Or do they express a grim sense that the “she” is now utterly dead forever, absorbed into the earth but not in any way that provides a feeling of comfort to those she has left behind? The darker interpretation of these lines would emphasize the fact that she now seems entirely passive: she is “Rolled round” (7) rather than having any independent spirit or consciousness or movement. The more optimistic interpretation would argue that she has now become one with the earth and, indeed, with the entire universe. 

The darker interpretation would stress that she now seems to have no more life than dead, inanimate “rocks” and “stones” (8). The more optimistic interpretation would emphasize the final word “trees” (8) and suggest that she is now part of something far greater, more alive, and more significant than any single self.

Ultimately, the way one chooses to interpret these final lines probably depends more on one’s own temperament than on anything in the poem itself. The poem can therefore seem at least as interesting for what it reveals about the reader as for what it reveals about itself.

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