She dwelt among the untrodden ways.doc

She dwelt among the untrodden waysFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search William Wordsworth, author of 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 Wordsworths and Samuel Taylor Coleridges poems that marked a climacteric in the English Romantic movement. The poem is the best known of Wordsworths series of five works which comprise his Lucy series, and was a favourite amongst early readers.1 It was composed both as a meditation on his own feelings of loneliness and loss, and as an ode to the beauty and dignity of an idealised woman who lived unnoticed by all others except by the poet himself. The title line implies Lucy lived unknown and remote, both physically and intellectually. The poets subjects isolated sensitivity expresses a characteristic aspect of Romantic expectations of the human, and especially of the poets, condition.According to the literary critic Kenneth Ober, the poem describes the growth, perfection, and death of Lucy.2 Whether Wordsworth has declared his love for her is left ambivalent, and even whether she had been aware of the poets affection is unsaid. However the poets feelings remain unrequited, and his final verse reveals that the subject of his affections has died alone. Lucys untrodden ways are symbolic to the poet of both her physical isolation and the unknown details of her mind and life. In the poem, Wordsworth is concerned not so much with his observation of Lucy, but with his experience when reflecting on her death.3Contentshide 1 Structure and style 2 Lucy 3 Place among the Lucy series 4 Parodies 5 Notes 6 Bibliography 7 External linksedit Structure and styleWikisource has original text related to this article: She dwelt among the untrodden waysShe dwelt consists of three quatrains, and describes Lucy who lives in solitude near the source of the River Dove.4 In order to convey the dignity and unaffected flowerlike naturalness of his subject, Wordsworth uses simple language, mainly words of one syllable. In the opening quatrain, he describes the isolated and untouched area where Lucy lived, while her innocence is explored in the second, during which her beauty is compared to that of a hidden flower. The final stanza laments Lucys early and lonesome death, which only he notices.Throughout the poem, sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses. The effectiveness of the concluding line in the concluding stanza has divided critics and has variously been described as a masterstroke of understatement and overtly sentimental. Wordsworths voice remains largely muted, and he was equally silent about the poem and series throughout his life.1 This fact was often mentioned by 19th century critics, however they disagreed as to its value. A critic, writing in 1851, remarked on the poems deep but subdued and silent devour.5This is written with an economy and spareness intended to capture the simplicity the poet sees in Lucy. Lucys femininity is described in the verse in girlish terms, a fact that has drawn criticism from some critics that see a female icon, in the words of John Woolford represented in Lucy by condemning her to death while denying her the actual or symbolic fulfillment of maternity.6 To evoke the loveliness of body and spirit, a pair of complementary but opposite images are employed in the second stanza: a solitary violet, unseen and hidden, and Venus, emblem of love, and the first star of evening, public and visible to all.2 Wondering which Lucy most resembledthe violet or the starthe critic Cleanth Brooks concluded that although Wordsworth likely viewed her as the single star, completely dominating his world, not arrogantly like the sun, but sweetly and modestly. Brooks considered the metaphor only vaguely relevant, and a conventional and anomalous complement.7 For Wordsworth, Lucys appeal is closer to the violet and lies in her seclusion, and her perceived affinity with nature.6Wordsworth purchased a copy of Thomas Percys collection of British ballad material Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in Hamburg a few months before he began to compose the Lucy series. The influence of traditional English folk ballad is evident in the meter, rhythm, and structure of the poem. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways follows the variant ballad stanza a4b3a4 b3,2 and in keeping with ballad tradition seeks to tell its story in a dramatic manner.8 As the critic Kenneth Ober observed, To confuse the mode of the Lucy poems with that of the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, a story is told as boldly and briefly as possible.2 Ober compares the opening lines of She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways to the traditional ballad Katharine Jaffray and notes the similarities in rhythm and structure, as well as in theme and imagery:There livd a lass in yonder dale,And doun in yonder glen, O.And Katherine Jaffray was her name,Well known by many men, O.2According to the critic Carl Woodring, She Dwelt can also be read as an elegy. He views the poem and the Lucy series in general as elegiac in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death, and that they have the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology . if all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy poems are also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance.9One passage was originally intended for the poem MichaelRenewd their search begun where from Dove Crag / Ill home for bird so gentle / they lookd down / On Deep-dale Head, and Brothers-water.10edit LucyWordsworth wrote his series of Lucy poems during a stay with his sister Dorothy in Hamburg, Germany, between October 1798 and April 1801.11 The real life identity of Lucy has never been identified, and it is probable that she was not modeled on any one historical person.12 Wordsworth himself never addressed the matter of her persona,11 and was reticent about commenting on the series.1 Although a great detail is known of the circumstances and details of Wordsworths life, from the time he spend during of his stay in Germany comparatively little record survives. Only one known mention from the poet that references the series survives, and that mentions the series only, and not any of the individual verses.13The literary historian Kenneth Johnson concluded that Lucy was created as the personification of Wordsworths muse,and the group as a whole is a series of invocations to a Muse feared dead. As epitaphs, they are not sad, a very inadequate word to describe them, but breathlessly, almost aware of what such a loss would mean to the speaker: oh, the difference to me!14Writing in the mid-19th century, Thomas De Quincey said that Wordsworth,always preserved a mysterious silence on the subject of that Lucy, repeatedly alluded to or apostrophised in his poems, and I have heard, from gossiping people about Hawkshead, some snatches of tragic story, which, after all, might be an idle semi-fable, improved out of slight materials.15Pencil drawing of Williams sister Dorothy Wordsworth in later life.Lucys identity has been the subject of much speculation,16 and some have guessed that the poems are an attempt by Wordsworth to voice his affection for Dorothy;17 this line of thought reasoning that the poems dramatise Wordsworths feelings of grief for her inevitable death. Soon after the series was completed, Coleridge wrote, Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph / whether it had any reality, I cannot say. - Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die.18Reflecting on the importance and relevance of Lucys identity, the 19th-century literary critic Frederic Myers said, Here it was that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on Lucy. Of the history of that emotion, he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore, to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the poets honour, I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets rightly? Or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone, Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever.19 According to Karl Kroeber,Wordsworths Lucy possesses a double existence, her actual, historical existence and her idealised existence in the poets mind. The latter is created out of the former but neither an abstraction nor a conceptualisation, because the idealised Lucy is at least as concrete as the actual Lucy. In the poem, Lucy is both actual and idealised, but her actuality is relevant only insofar as it makes manifest the signifiance implicit in the actual girl.20Lucy is thought by others to represent his childhood friend Peggy Hutchinson, with whom he was in love before her early death in 1796Wordsworth later married Peggys sister, Mary.21edit Place among the Lucy seriesMain article: The Lucy poemsWordsworth established himself, according to the critic Norman Lacey, as a poet of nature in his volume Lyrical Ballads in which She Dwelt first appeared.22 Early works, such as Tintern Abbey, can be seen as an ode to his experience of nature (though he preferred to avoid this interpretation), or as a lyrical meditation on the fundamental character of the natural world. Wordsworth later recalled that as a youth nature once stirred in him, an appetite, a feeling and a love, but by the time he wrote Lyrical Ballads, it evoked the still sad music of humanity.23The five Lucy poems are often interpreted as representing both his apposing views of nature and a meditation on natural cycle of life.24 Strange fits presents Kind Natures gentlest boon, Three years its duality, and A slumber, according to the American literary critic Cleanth Brooks, the clutter of natural object.25 In Jones view, She dwelt, along with I travelled, represents its rustication and disappearance.24edit ParodiesShe dwelt. has been parodied numerous times since it was first published. In part, parodies of earlier works were intended to remark on the simplification of textual complexities and deliberate ambiguities in poetry, and on the way many 19th-century critics sought to establish a definitive reasonings. According to Jones, such parodies sought to comment in a meta-critical manner, and to present an alternative mode of criticism to the then mainstream mode.26Among the more notable are those by Hartley Coleridge (A Bard whom there were none to praise, / And very few to read) in 1834, and Samuel Butlers 1888 murder-mystery reading of the poem. Butler believed Wordsworths use of the phrase the difference to me! was overtly terse, and remarked that the poet was most careful not to explain the nature of the difference which the death of Lucy will occasion him to be . The superficial reader takes it that he is very sorry she was dead . but he has not said this.1These parodies were intended to question definitive interpretation of the verse, and highlight its indeterminacies.27edit Notes1. a b c d Jones, 4.2. a b c d e Ober, Kenneth; Ober, Warren. Samuil Marshaks Translations Wordsworths Lucy Poems. Germano-Slavica, January 2005.3. Slakey, 629.4. Wordsworth knew three rivers of that name; in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Westmorland, but each could equally be the setting for the verse.5. Poetry, Sacred and Profane. Nottinghamshire Guardian, October 30, 1853.6. a b Woolford, John. Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti and the Wordsworthian Scene of Writing. Wordsworth Circle 34.1, 2003.7. Brooks, Cleanth, 729-741.8. Durrant, Geoffrey. William Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. 61.9. Woodring, 44, 48.10. Hartman 1934, 1344211. a b Rolfe, i.12. Murray, 85.13. Jones, 6.14. Johnson, 463.15. Davies, Hugh Sykes. Lake Reminiscences. 247.16. Abrams, M.H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 2A, The Romantic Period. (7th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.17. Coleridge was the first to raise the possibility that Lucy may represent Dorothy18. Johnson, 464.19. Myers, Frederic William Henry. Wordsworth. Project Gutenberg. 33. Retrieved on 7 October 2007.20. Kroeber, 106-107.21. Cavendish, Richard. Death of Dorothy Wordsworth: January 25th, 1855. History Today, January 2005. 55.22. Lacey, 1.23. Lacey, 3.24. a b Jones, 190.25. Brooks, 736.26. Jones, 9527. Davies, Damien Walford. Lucys Trodden Ways. Oxford University Press, 1995.edit Bibliography Brooks, Cleanth. Irony as a Principle of Structure. In Zabel, Morton D. (ed): Literary Opinion in America. New York: Harper, 2nd edition, 1951. Kroeber, Karl. The Artifice of Reality: Poetic Style in Wordsworth, Foscolo, Keats, and Leopardi. Madidon: University of Wisconsin, 1964. Johnston, Kenneth. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN 0-393-04623-0 Jones, Mark. The Lucy Poems: A Case Study in Literary Knowledge. Toronto:The University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8020-0434-2 Lacey, Norman. Wordsworths View Of Nature. Cambridge: University Press. 1948. Murray, Roger N. Wordsworths Style: Figures and Themes in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. Rolfe, William J. William Wordsworth, Select Poems of William Wordsworth. New York: American Book, 1889. Slakey, Roger L. At Zero: A Reading of Wordsworths She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Volume 12, issue 4, Autumn, 1972. 629638. Woodring, Carl. Wordsworth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.edit External links Biography and Works of William Wordsworthhide v t eWilliam WordsworthTopics Early lifePeople Samuel Taylor Coleridge Robert Southey Dorothy WordsworthLyrical Ballads Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Anecdote for Fathers Lucy Gray The Lucy poems o She dwelt among the untrodden wayso A slumber did my spirit sealo Strange fits of passion have I knowno Three years she grew in sun and shower The Matthew poems Michael, a Pastoral She dwelt among the untrodden ways Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey We are SevenLater poetry Peter Bell Composed upon Westminster Bridge Elegiac Stanzas I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud The Lucy poems o I travelled a