"Three years she grew in sun and shower" is a poem composed in 1798 by the English poet William Wordsworth, and first published in the Lyrical Ballads anthology which was co-written with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As one of the five poems that make up the "Lucy series", the work describes the relationship between Lucy and nature using a complex opposition of words and sentiments. Wordsworth uses antithetical couplings of words —'sun and shower', 'law and impulse' 'earth and heaven', 'kindle or restrain'— as a device to evoke the opposing forces at work in nature. There is further conflict and opposition between nature and mankind, as both attempt to possess Lucy. The poem thus contains both epithalamic and elegiac characteristics; the marriage described is between Lucy and nature, while her human lover is left to mourn in the knowledge that death has separated from her from mankind, and she will forever now be with nature.[1]
Nature interrupts the voice of the poet after the first line and a half, in the words of the literature historian Susan Eilenberg, usurping "the poet's control over his poem...and not letting him speak again until it (nature) has destroyed its subject".[2]
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