We Are Seven

The first line was written not by Wordsworth but by his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Originally, the line read, “A little child, dear brother Jem,” which was a reference to their friend James Tobin. The name was altered to Jim in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 so that it rhymed with “limb” in Line 3. However, Wordsworth never liked the line and in the collected edition of his poems in 1815, he shortened it to “—A simple child” (Line 1); he also changed Coleridge’s “little” to “simple”). This accounts for the irregularity of the first stanza among different versions of the poem. 

Stanzas 2 and 3 are devoted to a description of the eight-year-old girl. The first-person adult speaker states that she has thick curly hair and very much belongs to the country environment with her “woodland air” (Line 9) and her clothes that suggest a kind of unspoiled, country look: She is “wildly clad” (Line 10), or wearing clothes that reflect her rural setting. Her beauty gladdens the speaker’s heart, playing into Wordsworth’s frequent theme of the beauty and innocence of childhood. There is something special about this girl that the adult speaker recognizes.

In Stanza 4, the speaker attempts to engage her in conversation, asking her how many brothers and sisters she has. He wants to know how many people live in the cottage. Although Wordsworth does not point it out directly in the poem, Britain at the time was in the midst of a discussion about a national census: The first British census was taken in 1801, just three years after the publication of the poem. The speaker, in this context, sounds like a census taker on his way around the rural regions, trying to establish how many people live in the area. His focus on counting contrasts the unfeeling data of statistics with the girl’s aesthetic and emotional connection to her home. 

After the girl responds in Stanza 4 that her siblings number “seven in all” (Line 15), the speaker questions her further, wanting to establish if they all live in the cottage. The girl answers, in Stanzas 5 and 6, that two siblings live in Conway, two are at sea, and two are buried in the churchyard. This reply sets in motion the main conflict of the poem: the opposing views of death held by the child and the adult. Their disagreement contrasts imagination with reality; morally uninflected reason and facts are set against an intuitive sense of the continuity of life. The poem is thus a debate between two different ways of seeing and understanding.

The man is puzzled by the girl’s answer; he does not know what to make of it. To him, the situation is obvious: the little girl lives alone with her mother in the cottage, although she does have four surviving siblings, making five members of her generation in all. In Stanza 7, he therefore asks her, “How this may be” (Line 28) that she insists that they are seven. Her answer in Stanza 8 simply repeats what she has already said; there is obviously no doubt in her mind.

In Stanza 9, the narrator, having failed in his attempt to use simple arithmetic to convince her, gently tries to explain the difference between the living and the dead: Unlike her buried siblings, “You run about, my little maid, / Your limbs they are alive” (Lines 33-34). The fact that the two who lie in the churchyard cannot do this demonstrates the speaker’s arithmetic: “If two are in the church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five” (Lines 35-36), since seven minus two equals five. Surely the little girl will understand this, the speaker no doubt thinks. But the girl once more ignores adult logic. Death, as the adult understands it, does not exist for her. She elaborates, in Stanzas 10 through 12, that her buried siblings are part of many other activities: When she visits their graves, she knits, she hems, she sings to them, and sometimes when the evening is nice, she eats her supper there. The implication is that she did the same types of things with them before they were laid in the earth. 

To further show that she experiences no separation between herself and these dead siblings, in Stanzas 13 through 15, she supplies their names: Jane and John. Unlike the speaker, who is fixated on counting the members of the family in a way that depersonalizes each, the girl gives her dead siblings the dignity of identity—in fact, they are the only named people in the poem. Rather than simply subtracting them from the family, the girl narrates their fates. Jane was ill until “God released her of her pain, / And then she went away” (Lines 51-52). The euphemistic nature of this description makes it likely that the girl has heard an adult say this, probably her mother; she repeats it here without fully understanding what “went away” (Line 52) really means. After Jane’s death, the girl and John used to play around Jane’s grave; they had no sense of grief and thought that Jane was still present. A while later, John “was forced to go” (Line 59) also—another euphemism that talks around the concept of death.

In Stanza 16, the man has not quite given up, puzzled though he must still be. He tries one more time to convince the girl, using the same arithmetic argument and logic. Just as he has no idea of how to approach the matter differently, so she feels no need to say or think anything different, repeating “we are seven” (Line 64). In the final stanza, the adult grows a little exasperated, as the exclamation mark indicates: “But they are dead; those two are dead!” (Line 65). This is the first time the speaker has used the word “dead” to the little girl. The man realizes by now, however, that as she has little concept of death, thist is just “throwing words away” (Line 67). 

Wordsworth allows the little girl to have the last word, as she firmly denies the adult version of reality: “Nay, we are seven!” (Line 69). She refuses to be out-argued by the adult—and also manifests her own frustration at the speaker’s pigheadedness through a counter exclamation mark. Wordsworth, whose poetry often idealizes the state of childhood, has no desire to undermine her: Her reality retains its childlike integrity; the adult’s mathematical proofs cannot fracture it. The gulf between them remains.

The poem is carefully balanced; one cannot say that the adult is “right” and the girl is “wrong”; she feels a connection with her siblings lying in the churchyard that is completely valid for her, while the adult has no reason to question the obvious facts as he perceives them.