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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
A key tenet of Wordsworth’s Romanticism held that it was necessary to write about ordinary life. Narratives centering on the common man and the beauty of nature were preferable to lofty subject matter. While the Lucy poems paint the undefined female character as mysterious and mythic, they are firmly grounded in a natural and realistic locale, “besides the springs of Dove” (Line 2). Three rivers called Dove exist in England (in Derbyshire, Westmorland, and Yorkshire), and several streams have this name as well. Thus, the location would have conjured the English countryside for Wordsworth’s reader; the blooming flower suggests that it is early spring.
The image of water bubbling up from an underground source metaphorically connects with Wordsworth’s famous idea that good poems must rely on the “spontaneous overflow of feeling” (See: Further Reading & Resources). This interred movement suggests that, despite Lucy being dead and “in her grave” (Line 11), her memory revives the environment and nourishes the natural surroundings. While Lucy is now physically gone, the imaginative echo of her memory springs up everywhere.
By William Wordsworth
A Complaint
William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Daffodils
William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
William Wordsworth
London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
She Was a Phantom of Delight
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth