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.

Expressions of Horror: Emotional Storylines

Copyright 2012 by Gary L. Pullman

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King admits, “If I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out.” These two emotions--horror and disgust--are viewed by many as the two main emotions--some might argue the only emotions--that horror fiction evokes.

However, King doesn’t believe that himself, nor, it seems likely, does any other writer or editor of horror stories, any writer or director of horror films. Like any other genre of literature, horror fiction makes use of a range and variety of emotions--and mental states or conditions--among which are the following:

Desperation (Mrs. Cornelia Hilyard embodies desperation when she begs stranger to assist her in Lady in a Cage.)

Humiliation (In Dahmer, Jeffrey Dahmer is humiliated when his father discovers that the mannequin that his son stole and dresses is a male, rather than a female, mannequin.)

Grief (Both Dr. David Callaway and his daughter Emily express grief following the death of David's wife [Emily's mother]).

Curiosity (Caroline Ellis’ curiosity as to what lies behind the locked attic room gets her killed in The Skeleton Key.)

Anxiety (Marion Crane exemplifies this emotion at the start of Psycho, both before and after she absconds with her boss’ money and particularly when she is followed by the state police officer after she has left town with the stolen loot.)

Madness (Norman Bates’ close ups at the end of Psycho, when he has, for all intents and purposes become his dead mother, illustrate this emotion.).

Vulnerability (Jane Hudson personifies this condition in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.)

Sadistic delight (Tuesday Wells reflects sadistic delight as a murderess in Pretty Poison.)

Wonder (Marte in Day of Wrath emotes wonder.)

Innocence (Regan MacNeil is the very picture of innocence--before and after she is possessed in The Exorcist.)

Hysteria (Heather Donahue, in tears in The Blair Witch Project, expresses hysteria as she videotapes herself.)

Ecstasy (Catherine Ballard, in Crash, experiences ecstasy.)

Shock (Juno is shocked when she accidentally kills her friend Beth in The Descent.)

Revulsion (Andre Delambre is repulsed at his personal appearance after he becomes a human fly in The Fly; the human body, especially its sexual parts and aspects, is a source of repulsion for characters in body horror films, such as many of David Cronenberg's movies.)

A series of such emotions can, in fact, create what might be called an emotional storyline. The looks of anxiety, indecision, anxiety, relief, disturbance, repentance, shock, fear, and horror on Marion Crane’s face in Psycho, for example, both complement the film’s action and are complemented, in return, by the film’s action as these expressions tell--or show--the story, in their own way, as much as the overt action and dialogue do. The same is true of other horror films--or for movies in general, for that matter. Often, in fact, such emotional storylines follow formulas such as the one suggested by the expression “curiosity killed the cat” (The Skeleton Key is an example: Caroline Ellis’ curiosity as to what lies behind the locked attic room gets her killed.)

Ray Bradbury's "Love Potion": Learning from the Masters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Ray Bradbury’s “Love Potion,” one of the flowers of evil in his Summer Morning, Summer Night anthology, is a deceptively simple tale, the unexpected twist at the end of which not only horrifies, but also delights.

Reclusive sisters, “large as sofas. . . and stuffed with time,” Miss Nancy Jillet and her sister Julia take “the air at four in the morning,” when there is no one in the sleeping town in which they live to see them except the policeman walking his beat. While the two old ladies are rocking in the chairs on their front porch at two o’clock in the morning, eighteen-year-old Alice Ferguson, unable to sleep, “happened upon the Jillets.”

The women, after identifying their visitor, both by name and by age, tell her that she’s in love but that “he doesn’t love you,” which is why Alice is “unhappy and out walking late.” Nancy, however, assures her that she has come “to the right place.” Alice says that she “didn’t come,” but the woman shush her, saying that they will help her by giving her a “love potion.” They give her a green bottle, the contents of which Nancy describes as harmless ingredients:

“White flowers for the moon, summer-myrtle for the stars, lilacs for the rain, a red rose for the heart, a walnut for the mind. . . . Some clear water from the well to make all run well, and a sprig of pepper-leaf to warm his blood. Alum to make his fear grow small. And a drop of white cream so that he sees your skin like a moonstone.”

When Alice asks whether such a potion will “work,” Nancy assures her that it will; she and Julia have spent many years determining “why we never courted and never married,” and the results of their long investigation into these matters “boils down to” the potion they’ve given to her. Alice will be the first ever to try the potion, Nancy assures their visitor, because “it’s not just something you give to everyone or make and bottle all the time.” The sisters have too many interests, Nancy implies, for them to spend all their time on any single pursuit, even the manufacture and bottling of a love potion:

“We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us.”

It was while they were gardening, in fact, that they’d first seen Alice, “looking sad,” and had surmised that she was so “because of a man.” That was the moment that the sisters had resolved to try to help Alice, and they’d straightaway picked flowers from among the plants of their garden. All Alice needs to do to win her beloved is to add three drops to a beverage, “soda pop, lemonade or iced-tea.” Visiting the man of her dreams, he tells her, “I do love you.” Alice replies, “Now I won’t need this,” and shows him the green bottle which contains the sisters’ love potion. Perhaps she has already mentioned the topic, in a joke, to him, because he is not surprised by her production of the bottle and even advises her to “pour a little out. . .before you take it back, so it won’t hurt their feelings.” She does so, returning the rest to the Jillet sisters, assuring them, in answer to their question, that she administered a dose to her beloved. The women surprise Alice by announcing that they themselves will sample the potion, so that they will “have beautiful dreams and dream we’re young again.” The next morning, sirens awaken Alice, and she runs to her window, looks out, and sees “Miss Nancy and Miss Julia Jillet sitting on their front porch, not moving, in broad daylight, a thing they had never done before, their eyes closed; their hands dangling at their sides, their mouths gaping strangely.” They have about them the look of death, and the green bottle is set before them:

There was something about them, something that suggested sheaths from which the iron blade is gone. This, Alice Ferguson saw, and the crowd moving in, and the police, and the coroner, putting his hand up for the green bottle that glittered brightly in the sunlight, sitting on the rail.

Because of the apparent kindliness of the aged sisters and their seemingly sincere desire to “help” their beautiful, young, lovelorn neighbor, Bradbury deceives his reader, as it were, into believing the elderly sisters to be harmless. Reclusive spinsters, the may seem a bit eccentric, believing, as they do, in love potions, but they are also apparently harmless, even lovable, old women. However, the reader’s realization that the “love potion” that they gave Alice was really the same poison that they drank as a means of committing suicide shows that the women were anything but the kindly old ladies they appeared to be. Believing themselves to have committed murder, by killing the young man for whom Alice mooned, but who did not love her in return, the women next kill themselves, apparently to put themselves beyond the reach of the law. Bradbury’s story ends upon an eerie note, and the shock of the ending makes the reader reread the short story for clues as to what would motivate two seemingly nice old ladies to take their own lives after attempting to murder a stranger. It would be disappointing if Bradbury had taken the cheap way out by leaving the story a mystery, but he is too good a writer to rely upon a dues ex machina. His story does, indeed, contain clues that make the sisters’ monstrous deeds intelligible. The women are reclusive. They avoid others, keeping company only with one another. When they go outside their house, it is early in the morning, when the town is “undercover.” Upon meeting them, “in the milky dark of 2 a.m.,” Alice recalls “the tales of their solitary confinement in life,” a phrase which suggests not only isolation, but also punishment. If their self-imposed isolation from others is a form of punishment, for what offense are they enforcing it? Their intuitive understanding of the cause of Alice’s unhappiness is a clue. Upon seeing Alice walking past their garden, “looking sad,” they recognize the cause of her unhappiness, as being “a man,” perhaps because a man, in their past, had caused one or both of them to feel similar sorrow. They have spent a good many years, Nancy tells Alice, trying to “figure out why we never courted and never married,” and, having done so, they have concocted their “love potion.” Although it may be “too late” for them to “help” themselves, they can “help” Alice, who seems to suffer from the same heartache that had such a devastating effect upon their own lives. Whatever the reason for the failure of romance in the days of their youth, it seems that the spinsterish sisters blame themselves, for they have, as it were, sentenced themselves to “solitary confinement in life,” becoming recluses whose only company they keep is one another’s. They have spent the long years, “since 1910,” as they confide to Alice, when, possibly, their hopes for love were dashed, in activities that seem to have been designed to sublimate their sexual drives:

“We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us.”

Possibly to spare Alice such a lonely and unfulfilling life as theirs has been, despite the many hobbies and pastimes with which they’ve attempted to fill their lives--lives which, nevertheless, the narrator characterizes as “stuffed with time and dust and snow”--they gave her a potent poison to administer to the object of her unrequited love. It is a gesture of kindness that is anything but kind, but the spinsters have apparently long since passed beyond rationality, supposing that the murder of the young man who doesn’t share Alice’s love would be justifiable if it brings Alice relief after her initial grief. Believing themselves to have accomplished their mission, they drink the poison themselves, thus adding the crime and sin of suicide to that those of murder. Their own unrequited or failed love, it seems, has twisted them, and, over the years, the lonely spinsters, unable to find fulfillment in one another’s company or in the many activities they have tried to pass the time over the years during their self-imposed “solitary confinement,” have come to see their young neighbor’s own unrequited love as a long-lasting torment which may give some purpose to their lives if they can deliver Alice from the hell that they have had to endure since 1910. Instead, they would have caused Alice untold grief by such an action, since, as the young man confides, he already does love Alice. Their romance, which could lead to marriage, almost ended before it began, in the death of the man of Alice’s dreams, and, blinded by their own torment and grief, neither of the sisters were capable of imagining that their reading of Alice’s unhappiness and its cause was a result not of special insight, as they might have supposed, but of a projection of their own experience onto the life of another person. Their solipsistic self-exile from life and the irrationality that preceded and follows from such “solitary confinement” is the horror that makes them monstrous and villainous, despite their appearances as harmless old ladies to the contrary. Bradbury’s masterful writing allows the horror and the delight that rear, shockingly, at the end of this compact, deceptively simple story of heartache, madness, and seclusion. By emulating Bradbury’s technique, other writers can accomplish similar results.