A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

Content Warning: This section includes child death.

Wordsworth’s poem presents death as a transformative experience. When the girl dies, she doesn’t meet a finite end; rather, the girl pivots to a different existence. Inseparable from nature, the girl is “[r]olled around in earth’s diurnal course” (Line 7). She becomes a part of the world’s daily—“diurnal”—activities. While the tone is melancholy, the theme circumscribes the sadness and loss. The girl isn’t gone forever: What’s absent is her human form. Now, the girl has become an element of nature, so she’s forever a part of the landscape, like the “rocks, and stones, and trees” (Line 8). 

Death, in this vision, is not annihilation—it is absorption into something larger and eternal. Presumably, once the speaker dies, they will join nature and reconnect with the girl. The theme indicates that no one dies and forever leaves the world. Creating a spiritual continuity, each dead person transitions to a part of the earth’s natural environment. Thus, death isn’t a predominately gloomy or sorrowful experience—it’s a change that every person experiences.

In the context of Coleridge’s Dorothy interpretation, the theme provides comfort to Wordsworth. Since death doesn’t represent a concrete conclusion to a person’s life, Wordsworth soothes his “fears” (Line 2) about his beloved sister.