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

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

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.

Commentary

 

 In the first stanza, we learn that the speaker was, as it were, asleep to the reality of human mortality. Like a youth who is unaware of death or discounts it, he “had no human fears.” His beloved seemed to be immortal. For many young people, death is not much of a concern. Invulnerable and immortal, many young people believe that death happens only to other people-and, usually, to older other people. Apparently, the speaker of the poem shares these same illusions. For him, as he tells us, his Lucy “seemed a thing that could not feel/ The touch of earthly years.”

When his immature attitude toward death and his unrealistic notions about the immortality of his beloved are shattered by her untimely demise, the speaker is clearly appalled by the inescapable fact that his beloved Lucy, once a vibrant and lovely young woman, has been reduced to a mere object. Horribly, she has become a mere thing among things, motionless, lifeless, deaf, and blind, like all the other inanimate objects that are “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”:

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.

For anyone, the death of a loved one is terrible. It is perhaps more horrible still for a young man who has believed that death happens only to others and could never touch his beautiful young Lucy. The comparison, in the second stanza of the poem, of the inanimate Lucy to “rocks, and stones, and trees” reinforces the speaker’s sense of shock and horror, echoing the numbing grief that he obviously feels. In having been so rudely awakened, as it were, from the “slumber” that once “sealed” his spirit, he has suffered the death of an illusion. He may be wiser, but he is also sadder. The final lines of the poem suggest, perhaps, the numbness that he now feels-a numbness that is akin to the insensate condition of the deceased Lucy. He, too, has become something of an insensate thing, akin to “rocks, and stones, and trees.”

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth: Analysis and Commentary

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

Commentary

This is one of several short poems that William Wordsworth wrote concerning the death of a beautiful young woman named Lucy. Like its companions, this deceptively simple piece is a meditation on death and how it affects the loved one’s survivor.

The Lucy of this poem is not famous. She was not celebrated. In fact, she lived an isolated and obscure life “among the untrodden ways.” As the speaker of the poem informs us, there was no one to sing her praises, and only a few loved her during her life. She was, if we were to use a harsher term than the poem employs, a nobody.

If the first stanza of the poem tells us that Lucy lived an obscure, lonely, and isolated existence virtually unknown and uncelebrated, the second stanza tells us that the speaker of the poem, nevertheless, found her to be a rare beauty. He compares her to “a violet by a mossy stone/ Half-hidden from the eye” and then emphasizes that beauty further by pointing to its rarity. As a flower, she was “half-hidden from the eye.” As a heavenly body, so to speak, she was “Fair as a star/ When only one is shining in the sky.” 

Imagine the sky at night, pitch black, even though there are no clouds, with only one star shining in that inky darkness. The eye would be drawn to it instantly, and its solitary brightness would seem all the brighter by virtue of it’s being alone. The implication is that the lonely Lucy had seemed all the more beautiful to her lover because she lived alone, “among the untrodden ways.”

In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker points out that isolated Lucy lived a life that was so seemingly insignificant that only a handful of people even knew that she had died: “She lived unknown, and few could know/ When Lucy ceased to be.” However, for the speaker, the death of his beautiful, beloved Lucy has made a world of difference: “But she is in her grave, and, oh,/ The difference to me!”

Most of us, beautiful or not, do not achieve great fame. Most of us are not praised or celebrated. Nevertheless, a simple, unassuming girl can mean more than anyone, including herself, can imagine, especially when she is no longer one who dwells “among untrodden ways”—or anywhere else. To gain an appreciation of the power of this poem, all one needs to do is imagine that its Lucy is one’s own girlfriend. She may not be a movie star, but her death would hurt far more than that of any sultry siren of the silver screen who, despite her fame and celebrity, was unknown and unloved.

Literature: A Communal Ceremony

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

According to H. G. Wells, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were good periods for the writing of short stories. In fact, these years were the high point, he declares, for the publishing of such tales, and many were the writers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who tried their hands at crafting such fiction: Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, Frank Harris, Robert Louis Stevenson, Max Beerbohm, Henry James, George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella d’Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Mariot Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs, Christopher Isherwood, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, H. E. Bates, John O’Hare, Eric Linklater, and Naomi Mitcheson. (It pays anyone who wants to write to read widely, and when a celebrated writer lists writers whom he admires, one is well advised to read a sampling of their works, which is why this post includes the names that Wells cites in his “Introduction” to his collected stories.)

Wells says that, in these days, he always found it easy to write short stories. He could write one about nearly any topic:

I turned out tale after tale like a baker making fruit tarts. They were all about three or four thousand words long. You laid hands on almost anything that came handy, a droning dynamo, a fluttering bat, a bacteriologist’s tube, a whale’s otolith, a blast furnace at night, or what not; ran a slight human reaction round it; put it in the oven, and there you were (“Introduction” to the revised version of “Country of the Blind”).

There were no rigid requirements about the subject matter or even, very much, the form that such stories were supposed to take, which made the writing of them easier and their inspiration more plenteous:

[The short story might] be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention and imagination and mood can give (“Introduction” to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories).

Wells found inspiration everywhere:

I found that, taking almost anything as a starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or little incident more or less relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban gardens; I would find I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity (“Introduction” to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories).

As is often the case, the success of this art form gave rise to a critical study of it, and, before long, practitioners of this gross science would “murder” that they “might dissect,” and editors, Wells says, believed that they understood the market for writers’ “products.” The bean counters also entered the fray, presumably, as “every editor” began to trail “a real or imaginary public behind him.” In short, the short story became both a topic of scholarly and critical study and a product for the marketplace. These developments had a crushing effect upon the art of the story, Wells believes:

There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it were as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what anyone of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes’ reading or so (“Introduction” to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories).

For his part, Wells prefers the old ways, wherein a story could be about “almost anything”:

I. . . am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. . . .

. . . The short story is a fiction that may be read in something under an hour, and so [long] that it is moving and delightful, it does not matter if it is. . . ‘trivial’ [or]. . . human or inhuman (“Introduction” to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories).

Certainly, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe argues something quite different than Wells does, believing that a short story should be purposefully written with but one goal in mind, which is to deliver, at the conclusion of the tale, as throughout, a single, unified effect in the best way possible. Aspiring writers are likely to come across differences of opinion among celebrated writers, just as they might when watching the proceedings of a criminal trial wherein both the defense and the prosecution call expert witnesses to testify about a theoretical issue pertaining to the case. Experts disagree.

There seems to be at least three reasons for such disagreements, when it comes to theories about literary art, at any rate.

First, individuals, whether Sigmund Freud or Edgar Allan Poe or H. G. Wells tend to write as if they were the voice of all men and women, everywhere and for all time, rather than one person who is here and now. Their dictums are opinions dressed up, as it were, in royal robes, and their pens are, therefore, sometimes mistaken for scepters. While only a fool would disregard the considered opinions of a Poe or a Wells (notice the exclusion of Freud), only a fool, likewise, would take his pronouncements as gospel. The individual expresses his or her own thoughts only, and each one who considers them must do so with his or her own mind in gear, rather than in neutral or park, deciding what, and to what degree, to give credence to such statements. The truth is likely to be between such extremes of opinion.

Second, as an art develops, so do lenses for viewing it and principles for using these lenses. Like critics, readers will also come to understand, and to seek, patterns within works. John Hammond, the president of the H. G. Wells Society and editor of The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells, notes, in his “Introduction” to the book, that Wells writes to a formula: “In each case the central character is an ordinary person whose life changes in an unforeseen way and who finds it difficult to return to normality. . . . The typical Wells hero is a person going about his everyday affairs whose life is turned upside-down by a random event or encounter.” Although, within this framework, there is no doubt that Wells’ stories were imaginative and varied and “horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly illuminating,” they do have a tendency to unfold in the manner described by Hammond. Likewise, although they may have been written as Wells’ fancy dictated, they were published, Hammond points out, only after considerable revision on the author’s part:

. . . There is a widespread impression that Wells was a facile writer who did not take pains over his writing and rarely revised his work. In fact the reverse is the case. The manuscripts of most of his novels and short stories still survive, all written in his minute spidery handwriting (no word processors in those days). These reveal that his stories were most carefully written and revised, often going through draft after draft before he was satisfied. ‘A Dream of Armageddon,’ for example, went through six versions before reaching its final form, and the different drafts of ‘The Country of the Blind’ reveal an extraordinary amount of indecision, especially its final paragraph.

In short, as William Wordsworth points out, we do “murder to dissect,” and, as a result, we learn more about the blood and guts inside the skin, whether of the human corpse per se or of the literary specimen. This knowledge, in turn, generally allows improvements upon the structure and the mechanics of the story, even if, at times, it also may stifle the author’s creativity. Likewise, by learning the tricks of the writer’s trade, the reader comes to expect better and greater writing, which, like the critics’ “dissection” of the form, enhances the artistry of the artists whose art produces the story. It’s a circle, sometimes vicious, but one in which, to a greater or lesser degree, each of its participants--writer, critic, and reader--are served more or less well.

Third, art, like religion, can be studied from either of two perspectives. In religion, there is prophecy, which is to say, revelation, and there is dogma, which is to say, tradition. Although the two are ultimately complementary, they are, in the short term, and especially in the moment, often seemingly antithetical and antagonistic. Revelation is new knowledge or instruction, from on high, from God himself, as given through the intermediacy of a prophet. It is the spirit of the law, so to speak. Dogma is revelation stored and mediated through the priest. It is the letter of the law, as it were. Both are necessary and, ultimately, complementary. Analogously, the writer is the prophet, speaking, as it were, for the muse who inspires him or her. The critic and the writer are the clergy and the laity, who practice the “faith” that is given to them by the writer. At the same time, to better understand that which art has given them, they codify and interpret and canonize. It is through the work of all parties that fiction becomes whatever it is at any moment and whatever, in the future, it may become. Like faith, literature is the creation of a community of the faithful, consisting of not the writer only, nor the critic only, nor the reader only, but all parties together. Literature is a communal ceremony.

The Birth of Monsters and Other Poems

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts ("Horrific Poems: A Sampler" and "Charles Baudelaire's 'Carrion'"), I shared a few poems in the horror genre. In this post, I'm sharing a few of my own verses, which, hopefully, will be found diabolical enough to thrill, if not to chill.

I chose the sonnet because of its rhyme scheme. The sonnet form I've selected requires that, in the first twelve lines, the last word of each alternate line must rhyme. It also requires that the last two lines constitute a rhyming couplet. The overall rhyme scheme often forces an image, a trope, a thought, or a sentiment, thereby, helping, as it were, to write the poem itself, as if the rhyme scheme were something of a muse.

To The Wind

The wind blows free, but you and me,
We are captives, bound by a force
Mightier than stone, field, or tree:
Gravity determines our course.
Within the confines of the earth,
We may go wand'ring as we please;
Our minds may conceive and bring forth
Flights of fancy, winged fantasies,
Divorced of flesh and wed to naught,
With no authority to say
Nay, ye have transcended what ought
Be thought or tried by mortal clay.
Fettered by our humanity,
A faint breeze is cause for envy.

The Birth of Monsters

Beneath the canopies of trees, shadows,
Thick and dark, fall across stained, moss-covered
Headstones, and the rising winter’s wind blows;
Leafless branches, like clawed fingers, scratch; stirred,
By a sudden gust, wreaths and flowers leap
From vases overturned, blow and scatter,
And, were the cadavers not buried deep,
They might, clotted with gore and blood-splattered,
Rise from their coffins and their graves, to reel
And stagger across the dark churchyard’s grounds,
Insensible and unable to feel,
Among the tombs and the burial mounds.
Look! Listen! The imagination warns;
Of such wild nights are ghastly monsters born!

The Great Debate

In life, the skeptic and the man of faith
Each sought to refute the other one’s view,
The former claiming that to see a wraith
Meant one had lost his reason, for, ‘tis true,
That quick is quick and dead is dead; buried,
Bodies are removed from society,
Fit for naught but food on which worms may feed.
The latter argued that the soul, set free
By the body’s death, ascends unto God,
In whose image and likeness it was made,
Leaving but mortal flesh beneath the sod,
The transcendent spirit beyond decay.
Their passionate arguments have long since
Ended, unsure--by their own deaths silenced.

Fiendish Kinsmen

Winged, fanged things with claws, vague and indistinct,
Haunt the dark; furtive and stealthy, seldom
Are they seen, for which reason they are linked,
More often than not, with nightmare or some
Horrid fantasy, reason’s predators,
Slimed in mucus and enveloped in blood,
Stalking, or creeping, or slinking through gore,
Vile, evil things unseen since Noah’s flood,
The very spawn, perhaps, of murd’rous Cain,
Living embodiments of sin, exiled
From Eden, homeless, now, but for the brain
Of man, whose thoughts are both wicked and wild.
Not once were these mad fiends clearly described,
Yet we know them well, for we’re of their tribe.

The Book of Art, the Book of Life

The image, metaphor, and symbol each
Is plucked, as a leaf, from the tree of life
That it, pressed within an art book, may teach
The lesson of sorrow, anguish, or strife.
Authors may select a flower, a dove,
An ocean liner cruising the vast deep,
A rainbow shining in the sky above,
Or a road winding up a mountain steep;
Wordsworth wrote of a cloud of daffodils
Beneath a clear sky, both bright and azure,
Keats of a granary at autumn filled,
And Blake of a lamb, wooly-bright and pure;
Only in poems by Baudelaire and Poe
Does art blush to see blood and guts on show.

The Roulette Wheel

The roulette wheel, having been twirled, must whirl,
Its silver ball leaping from red to black,
Having, from the Croupier’s hand been hurled,
A fortune risked upon its fateful track.
Past the even and the odd, the small ball
Runs round the tilted track within the wheel;
Where it shall stop, no one yet knows, but all
Watch, transfixed, to see which fate it shall seal--
In Europe, thirty seven chances be,
One more in American destinies:
In the modern world, our technology
Has replaced the Norns, Moirae, and Parcae:
The wheel spins with pain, grief, and misery,
Red blood, black death, and silvery decay.

Horrific Poems: A Sampler

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The horror genre is not quite devoid of poems, but there are few enough, especially of any length. Among their number may be counted the Old English epic Beowulf, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Some of the shorter poems that could be classified as horror poems--or, at least, as horrific poems--include William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan,” John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Annabelle Lee,” and “The Bells.” Perhaps we might also include Robert Browning’s “My Last Bishop,” William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, and Ariel’s song about the “sea-change” in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Beowulf, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and The Raven are too long to post in this blog, but we’ll take a gander at the shorter ones.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kiss'd to sleep.

And there we slumber'd on the moss,
And there I dream'd, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd--"La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.



The Conqueror Worm

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly--
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama--oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!-- it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out--out are the lights--out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

The Haunted Palace

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace--
Radiant palace--raised its head.

In the monarch Thought's dominion
It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This--all this--was in the olden Time long ago),
And every gentle air that dallied
In that sweet day,
Upon the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-timed law.
Round about a throne where, sitting,
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace-door,
Through which came, flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing
In voices of surpassing beauty
The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn--for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his house of glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

And travelers, now, within that valley
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly, rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh--but smile no more.

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;--
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and She was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee--
With a love that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up, in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we--
Of many far wiser than we--
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: --

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea--
In her tomb by the side of the sea.

My Last Duchess

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fr Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will't please you sit and look at her?
I said``Fr Pandolf'' by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fr Pandolf chanced to say ``Her mantle laps
``Over my lady's wrist too much,'' or ``Paint``
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
``Half-flush that dies along her throat:'' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart---how shall I say?---too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace---all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,---good! but thanked
Somehow---I know not how---as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech---(which I have not)---to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, ``Just this
``Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
``Or there exceed the mark''---and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,---
E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Lucy Gray

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor, --
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!

You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.

"To-night will be a stormy night--
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow."

"That, Father! will I gladly do:
'Tis scarcely afternoon--
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!"

At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a faggot-band;
He plied his work;--and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.

They wept--and, turning homeward, cried,
"In heaven we all shall meet;"--
When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!--

Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

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

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!–
Fair as a star, when only oneIs shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round the earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stone, and trees.

Ariel’s Song (The Tempest)

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Note: If you’re interested in critical commentary concerning these poems, visit SparkNotes .