It’s still considered impolite to refer to someone as “she” in conversation without first establishing who she is, hence the conventional “Who’s she? the cat’s mother?”. Now comes the point where the study guides lead us astray: “She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years”. (We might ask why he feels the need to qualify the fears he doesn’t have as human, but otherwise this is straightforward). The choice of words (“slumber” rather than “sleep”), syntactic inversion (“my spirit seal” rather than “seal my spirit”) and the strong sound-patterning all put us in the realm of heightened poetic language, but at its simplest the poet fell asleep and wasn’t frightened. “A slumber did my spirit seal / I had no human fears”. But for me it’s not the interpretation that most naturally and immediately arises from the words themselves – or at least it wouldn’t be if we hadn’t been pre-conditioned to see it that way by generations of critics and study guides. I enjoy looking at it through this lens and through a number of others. To be clear from the outset: poetry is an art born of ambiguity, and many of the best poems can be read in different ways – so I’m not saying that it’s wrong to interpret the poem as an elegy.

But these are contextual points: my main problem with the “dead girl” reading of the poem is that it’s at odds with the natural logic of the words themselves. It’s also the only one not to mention Lucy by name. For starters, it was editors after Wordsworth’s death who deemed this one of the Lucy poems, not the poet himself. It works.īut I’ve always had a problem with interpreting the poem this way. And yes, the poem can certainly be made to fit this reading. This has led to a traditional reading where “she” is Lucy and the poem is an eerie but beautiful meditation on the finality of death. The poem is normally grouped as one of Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, a cluster of elegies about the death of a young girl. But there’s a dragon – or at least a critical worm – to be slain here first. This is powerful stuff, and I could happily spend the whole post looking at its sound-play and diction (the music of those open vowels the lurch from plain language into that incongruous and brilliant “diurnal”). A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (William Wordsworth, 1798)

Sometimes this can lead us in surprising directions.

One of the joys of close reading is that it allows us to look at a poem as words on the page, unencumbered by any received wisdom about its “themes” or “interpretation”.

Slumber by samantha young