"A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem written by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

 in 1798 and published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...

. It is usually included as one of his Lucy poems

The Lucy poems

The Lucy poems are a series of five poems composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth between 1798 and 1801. All but one were first published during 1800 in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that was both Wordsworth's...

, although it is the only poem of the series not to mention her name.

Background

During the autumn of 1798, Wordsworth travelled to Germany with his sister Dorothy and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

. From October 1798, Wordsworth worked on the first drafts for his "Lucy poems", which included "Strange fits of passion have I known

Strange fits of passion have I known

"Strange fits of passion have I known" is a seven-stanza poem ballad by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Composed during a sojourn in Germany in 1798, the poem was first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads . The poem describes the poet's trip to his beloved Lucy's...

", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways" is a three-stanza poem written by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in 1798 when he was 28 years old. 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...

" and "A slumber". In December 1798, Wordsworth sent copies of "Strange fits" and "She dwelt" to Coleridge and followed his letter with "A slumber". Eventually, "A slumber", was published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...

.

Unique amongst Lucy poems, "A slumber" does not directly mention Lucy. The decision by critics to include the poem as part of the series is based in part on Wordsworth's placing it in close proximity to "Strange fits" and directly after "She dwelt" in the Lyrical Ballads.

Poem

The Lucy poems falls within a genre of poems that includes Robert Herrick

Robert Herrick (poet)

Robert Herrick was a 17th-century English poet.-Early life:Born in Cheapside, London, he was the seventh child and fourth son of Julia Stone and Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith....

's lamentations on the death of young girls. Written in spare language, "A slumber..." consists of two stanzas, each four lines. The first is built upon an even, soporific

Sleep

Sleep is a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness, relatively suspended sensory activity, and inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles. It is distinguished from quiet wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, and is more easily reversible than...

 movement in which figurative language

Literal and figurative language

Literal and figurative language is a distinction in traditional systems for analyzing language. Literal language refers to words that do not deviate from their defined meaning. Figurative language refers to words, and groups of words, that exaggerate or alter the usual meanings of the component...

 conveys the nebulous image of a girl. The poem begins:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years. (lines 1–4)

The second stanza maintains the quiet, even tone of the first, but serves to undermine the former's sense of the eternal by revealing that Lucy has, by the time of composition, died. The narrator's response to her death lacks bitterness or emptiness; and instead takes consolation from the fact that she is now beyond life's trials. and

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. (lines 5–8)

Themes

Lucy is an isolated figure in which the narrator responds to her death. The beginning of the poem, according to Wordsworth biographer Mary Moorman, depict a "creative sleep of the senses when the 'soul' and imagination are most alive." This idea appears in other poems by Wordsworth, including Tintern Abbey. The space between stanza one and stanza two depicts a transition of Lucy from life into death. The two stanzas also show that Lucy, a being connected intrinsically to nature, dies before she can attain her own distinct consciousness apart from nature. However, as literary critic Geoffrey Hartman explains, "Growing further into consciousness means a simultaneous development into death [...] and not growing further also means death (animal tranquillity, absorption by nature)." The lifeless rocks and stones described in the concluding line convey the finality of Lucy's death. Boris Ford argues that within the second stanza as "the dead girl is now at last secure beyond question, in inanimate community with the earth's natural fixtures." Coleridge, in a letter to Thomas Poole, states, "Whether it had any reality I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment when his sister might die."

Coleridge's reference was to the state of Lucy as dying or dead within the Lucy poems as a whole and to "A slumber" in particular. Although Lucy cannot be established, it is certain that there is a relationship between the name Lucy and Wordsworth's sister within Wordsworth's poetry since Wordsworth used the name Lucy in reference to his sister in many poems, including "The Glow-Worm" and "Nutting". The problem with relating Lucy to Dorothy is in explaining why Dorothy would be presented in a state of death. Within other Wordsworth poems like The Prelude

The Prelude

The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it...

, Dorothy is presented in a lively state. As such, the poems are most likely not about Dorothy but just a continuation of a theme in general.

Lucy is presented as character connected to nature who exists in a state between the spiritual and human; similar to a mythical nymph. However, she represents a state of consciousness and exists within the poem as part of the narrator's consciousness. The first stanza describes the narrator transcending human fears because his feelings towards an immortality connected to Lucy, a feeling brought up in "Strange fits". These feelings of immortality continue in the second stanza because, though dead, she is separated from him by death. She is always a being connected to nature, and the narrator slumbers because his understanding of Lucy is not conscious.

Since Lucy exists on an unconscious level for the narrator, he cannot grasp her until she has died. As such, he experiences the events as one who is woken from a dream without an understanding of what the dream entailed, and is not able to feel shock at learning of her death. This is thematically represented in the poem by placing Lucy's death between the two stanzas.

Critical reception

Upon receiving Wordsworth's letter containing a copy of "A slumber", Coleridge described the work as a "sublime epitaph". Wordsworth's friend Thomas Powell wrote that the poem "stands by itself, and is without title prefixed, yet we are to know, from the penetration of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers, that it is a sequel to the other deep poems that precede it, and is about one Lucy, who is dead. From the table of contents, however, we are informed by the author that it is about 'A Slumber;' for this is the actual title which he has condescended to give it, to put us out of pain as to what it is about."

In 1967, Hartman claims that within the poem, "Wordsworth achieves the most haunting of his elisions of the human as a mode of being separate from nature." John Mahoney, in 1997, emphasizes the poem's "brilliant alliteration of the opening lines" along with pointing out that "the utter simplicity masks the profundity of feeling; the delicate naturalness of language hides the range of implication".