Natural Consolation of Maternal Loss--- Analysis of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”

Abstract

The Lucy poems are five of the most famous and wonderful poems of William Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest English poets of the Romanticist era. The Lucy poems are a sequence of touching poems that are loosely connected and rearranged not by the author himself but by later generations. They are about how the persona meets a girl who lives in distant nature and how he grieves for her when she dies. It is widely acknowledged that the theme of the poems is grief and loss towards the persona’s lover. However, the identity or the archetype of the girl Lucy has been debated among Literary critics. To explore this, this article takes the final poem of the sequence, “A slumber did my spirit seal” as an example, and holds the argument that Lucy is the subconscious psychological role whose death represents the maternal losses of Wordsworth in his early years, and finally gives the interpretation that the poem conveys the theme that one can find consolation from mother nature to heal one’s own psychological wounds, just as in this poem the poet finds sadness and grief no more by realizing the fact the mother nature has embraced his dear Lucy, as well as himself. This article will analyze this argument by the methods of line-by-line close text analysis and interpretation.