William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 and is greatly renowned as an English Romantic poet. He and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are accredited with launching the Romantic Age in English Literature with their publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
The nature of the speaker of this poem, who has recently lost a loved one, is revealed through the narrator’s elegiac tone. The poem doubles as a eulogy that honors the life of Lucy who was “half hidden from the eye.” She was a woman who “dwelt among the untrodden ways.” She was known and love by few yet the narrator was one of the people that saw beauty in her and her loneliness. Her life was known to few yet was described as beautiful by the narrator which suggests that the narrator places great value in the simplicity found in life. He compares her to “a violet by a mossy stone,” suggesting his ability to see the hidden beauties of the world. He is grieving for her death yet still remembers the beauty that she exhibited in her life which reflects the narrator’s ability. We can see that the narrator is visibly shaken by her death as he exclaims “oh/ the difference to me!” This sentimentality describes the narrator’s empathy towards Lucy who, as the title suggests, walked a road traveled by no other. Her isolation in her life is matched only by the isolation of the narrator now in her death. The little information given to the reader about Lucy also serves to isolate the reader from the poem in order to make the reader empathize with the narrator. Her death is symbolic of the end result of isolation and serves as a lesson: an implication to not indulge in solitude.
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