A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

Content Warning: This section includes child death.

The poem has several genres. The length and personal tone make it a lyric. Lyric poems don’t tend to be long, and they revolve around the emotions of the speaker. In “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” the poem exists because Wordsworth’s speaker wants to express their feelings about a girl who died. As the poem exists in a collection, Lyrical Ballads, it’s a ballad. Though there’s no music; it, like a ballad, tells a story—the story of a girl’s death. The presence of death makes the poem a eulogy: The poem marks the girl’s death. Yet the poem isn’t a typical eulogy. It doesn’t name the “she,” nor does it present the death as tragic. Instead, it filters the loss through a calm, philosophical acceptance. Embracing a transcendent, Romantic tone, the speaker suggests the girl has moved on from her human form and become a part of nature. In line with Romantic ideals, the girl is not mourned as lost, but understood as subsumed into a grander natural cycle. The metamorphosis isn’t negative. 

The “my” and “I” belong to the speaker (Lines 1-2).