She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

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"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" is a three-stanza poem written by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in 1798. The verse was first printed in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, a volume of Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems that marked a climacteric in the English Romantic movement.

The poem is the best known of Wordsworth's five "Lucy" poems. It was composed both as a meditation on his own feelings of loneliness and loss, and as an ode to the beauty and dignity of an idealised woman who lived unnoticed by all others except by the poet himself. The title line implies Lucy lived unknown and remote, in both in the physical intellectual senses. The poet's subject's isolated sensitivity expresses a characteristic aspect of Romantic expectations of the human, and especially of the poet's, condition.

According to the literary critic Kenneth Ober, the poem describes the "growth, perfection, and death" of Lucy.^[2] Whether Wordsworth's love for her has been declared is left ambivalent, and even whether she has been made aware of the poet's affection is unsaid. However the poet's feelings remain unrequited, and his final verse reveals that the subject of his affections has died alone. Lucy's "untrodden ways" are symbolic to the poet of both her physical isolation and the unknown details of her mind and life. In the poem, Wordsworth is concerned not so much with his observation of Lucy, but with his experience when reflecting on her passing.^[3]

Contents 1 Structure and style 2 Lucy 3 Parodies 4 Notes 5 Bibliography 6 External links

[edit] Structure and style

The poem consists of three stanzas of four lines each. The poem tells of a woman living in solitude, near the source of the River Dove. Wordsworth knew three rivers of that name; in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Westmorland, and each could be the setting for the verse. In order to convey the dignity and unaffected flowerlike naturalness of Lucy, Wordsworth uses simple language, mainly words of one syllable. In the opening verse, the poet describes the isolated, untouched area where Lucy lived, while her innocence is explored in the second, during which her beauty is compared to that of a hidden flower. The final stanza laments Lucy's early and lonesome death. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways is written with an economy and spareness intended to capture the simplicity the poet sees in Lucy. Throughout the poem, sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, as is emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses. The effectiveness the concluding line in the concluding stanza has divided critics and has variously been described as "a masterstroke of understatement" and overtly sentimental.

Lucy's femininity is described in the verse in girlish terms, a fact that has drawn criticism from some critics that see a female icon, in the words of John Woolford "represented in Lucy by condemning her to death while denying her the actual or symbolic fulfilment of maternity".^[4] To evoke the "loveliness of body and spirit", a pair of complementary but opposite images are employed in the second stanza: a solitary violet, unseen and hidden, and Venus, emblem of love, and the first star of evening, public and visible to all.^[2] Wondering which was Lucy most like, the violet or the star, the critic Cleanth Brooks concluded that although Wordsworth likely viewed her as "the single star, completely dominating [his] world, not arrogantly like the sun, but sweetly and modestly", the metaphor was only vaguely relevant; a conventional and anomalous complement.^[5] For Wordsworth, Lucy's appeal is closer to the violet and lies in her seclusion, and her perceived affinity with nature.^[4]

Wordsworth purchased a copy of Thomas Percy's collection of British ballad material "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" in Hamburg a few months before he began to compose the Lucy series. The influence of traditional English folk ballad is evident in the meter, rhythm, and structure of the poem. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways follows the variant ballad stanza a4--b3--a4 b3,^[2] and in keeping with ballad tradition seeks to tell a verse story in a dramatic fashion.^[6] As the critic Kenneth Ober observes, "To confuse the mode of the 'Lucy' poems with that of the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, a story is told as boldly and briefly as possible. Ober compares the opening lines of She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways to the traditional ballad Katharine Jaffray and notes the similarities in rhythm and structure, as well as in theme and imagery:

The verse can also be read as an elegy; according to Carl Woodring the poem is: "elegiac in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death," and they "have the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology.... If all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy poems are also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance".^[7]

[edit] Lucy

Wordsworth wrote his series of "Lucy" poems during a stay with his sister Dorothy in Hamburg, Germany, between October 1798 and April 1801.^[8] The real life identity of Lucy has never been identified, and it is probable that she was not modeled on any one historical person.^[9] Wordsworth himself never addressed the matter of her persona,^[8] and was reticent about commenting on the series.^[10] Although a great detail is known of the circumstances and details of Wordsworth's life, the Lucy series was written while he was in Goslar, Germany, a time from which comparatively little record from his life survives. Only one surviving mention from the poet that references the series survives, and that mentions the series only, and not any of the individual verse.^[11]

The literary historian Kenneth Johnson concluded that Lucy was created as the personification of Wordsworth's muse,

and the group as a whole is a series of invocations to a Muse feared dead. As epitaphs, they are not sad, a very inadequate word to describe them, but breathlessly, almost aware of what such a loss would mean to the speaker: 'oh, the difference to me!'^[12]

According to Thomas DeQuincey, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Wordsworth,

always preserved a mysterious silence on the subject of that 'Lucy', repeatedly alluded to or apostrophised in his poems, and I have heard, from gossiping people about Hawkshead, some snatches of tragical story, which, after all, might be an idle semi-fable, improved out of slight materials.^[13]

As DeQuincey points out, Lucy's identity has been the subject of much speculation,^[14] and some have guessed that the poems are an attempt by Wordsworth to voice his conflicted affection for Dorothy. This line of thought reasons that the poems dramatise Wordsworth's grief for her future death. Coleridge was the first to raise the possibility that Lucy may represent Dorothy. Soon after the series was completed, Coleridge wrote, "Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph / whether it had any reality, I cannot say. - Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die."^[15]

Reflecting on the importance and relevance of Lucy's identity, the nineteenth-century literary critic Frederic Myers said, "Here it was that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on Lucy. Of the history of that emotion, he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore, to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the poet's honour, I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets rightly? or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone, Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever."^[16]

According to Karl Kroeber,

Wordsworth's Lucy possesses a double existence, her actual, historical existence and her idealised existence in the poet's mind. The latter is created out of the former but neither an abstraction nor a conceptualisation, because the idealised Lucy is at least as "concreat" as the actual Lucy. Lucy is both actual and idealised, but her actuality is relevant only insofar as it makes manifest the signifance implicit in the actual girl.^[17]

Lucy is thought by others to represente his childhood friend Peggy Hutchinson, with whom he was in love before her early death in 1796—Wordsworth later married Peggy's sister, Mary.^[18]

[edit] Parodies

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways has been parodied numerous times since it was first published. Among the more notable are those by Hartley Coleridge ("A Bard whom there were none to praise, / And very few to read") in 1834, and Samuel Butler's 1888 murder-mystery reading of the poem ("Note that Wordsworth is most careful not to explain the nature of the difference which the death of Lucy will occasion him to be...The superficial reader takes it that he is very sorry she was dead...but he has not said this.")

Such parodies serve to question definitive interepration of the verse, and highlight its indeterminacies.^[19]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Brooks, Cleanth. Irony as a Principle of Structure. In Zabel, Morton D. (ed): Literary Opinion in America. New York: Harper, 2nd edition, 1951.
• Kroeber, Karl. The Artifice of Reality: Poetic Style in Wordsworth, Foscolo, Keats, and Leopardi. Madidon: University of Wisconsin, 1964.
• Jones, Mark. The 'Lucy Poems': A Case Study in Literary Knowledge. Toronto:The University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8020-0434-2
• Murray, Roger N. Wordsworth's Style: Figures and Themes in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.
• Rolfe, William J. William Wordsworth, Select Poems of William Wordsworth. New York: American Book, 1889.
• Slakey, Roger L. "At Zero: A Reading of Wordsworth's 'She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways'". Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Volume 12, issue 4, Autumn, 1972. 629–638.
• Woodring, Carl. Wordsworth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

[edit] External links

• Biography and Works of William Wordsworth