Poem of the Day: ‘She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways’

If Wordsworth’s poem serves as self-defense, it seems meant to ward off an existential crisis.

Via Wikimedia Commons
Poet William Wordsworth. Via Wikimedia Commons

The “Lucy Poems” of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), all but one of which appeared in the 1800 second edition of the “Lyrical Ballads,” make a curious collection. By his own admission, Wordsworth never intended them as a sequence, but as a kind of emotional “self-defense.” He drafted them, one after another, in the year following his time in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as his near neighbor and literary collaborator.

With the lapse of Wordsworth’s and his sister Dorothy’s lease on the house at Alfoxden, they had decamped to Germany, where they had hoped once again to join forces with Coleridge and his wife, Sara. Economic disparity between the two households, however, meant that while the Coleridges lived and entertained glitteringly in Ratzeburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, the Wordsworths found themselves isolated, in modest and limited straits, in a small town in Lower Saxony.

It was in this isolation, envious of Coleridge’s circumstances and resenting his sister for whose upkeep he was responsible, that Wordsworth began the Lucy Poems. Scholars have quibbled for two centuries over Lucy’s identity. Perhaps it’s safest to say that — however we might read these elegies on their surface, and whether or not she had any counterpart in reality — the Lucy of these poems provided the poet with a repository for his own complex emotions in that low period following his first great artistic surge.

If “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” serves as self-defense, it seems meant to ward off an existential crisis. Wordsworth, feeling that he languished in obscurity, with the malaise that often follows bursts of productivity, could — we imagine — console himself a little with the thought that “a violet by a mossy stone” might still shine with the brilliance of a single star in the sky.

The making of a perfect little thing, in three common-meter abab stanzas, might not thrill as the first large-visioned passages of “The Prelude” would have done. Still, this small poem was something made, “and oh! / The difference to me!” 

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
by William Wordsworth

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!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.


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