22 pages • 44 minutes read
William WordsworthWe Are Seven
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: William Wordsworth’s Poetry About Children
Wordsworth wrote often about children. In addition to “We Are Seven,” there are a number of poems in Lyrical Ballads that feature children. These include the five short Lucy poems, about a beloved girl who has died. In “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the speaker celebrates her as a beautiful, almost unearthly creature: “She seem’d a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years” (Wordworth, William. “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal.” Poetry Foundation, 1800). The poem “Anecdote for Fathers,” like “We Are Seven” consists of an interaction between an adult and a child, in this case a father and his son. In “The Idiot Boy,” a boy with cognitive disabilities gets lost at night but there is a lot more to him than anyone realizes, such as his ability to interact joyfully with the environment. Wordsworth also wrote, in his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1850), about his own childhood in the Lake District as a time of joy and wonder in the experience of nature.
Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads that “We Are Seven” shows “the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion” (Brett, R. L. and A. R. Jones. Lyrical Ballads: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Methuen, 1975, pp. 247-48). Given this topic, it is not surprising that Wordsworth allows the little girl the validity of her perceptions, since they are close to what he himself experienced as a child. He later wrote in an explanatory note to his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality“ that, “Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being,” quoting the first stanza of “We Are Seven” as aligned with this idea. This inability, he writes, was partly due to “a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me” (Brett 286). Wordsworth also wrote of childhood in the “Ode” itself as an exalted state that has a different view of death:
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed, without the sense of sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie (Brett 287).
The last four lines suggest a child’s view of death as simply another form of existence in a grave. The “lonely bed” is likely one reason why the little girl in “We Are Seven” takes her knitting and sewing and sings to her two siblings who lie in the graveyard, and sometimes eats her supper there. In her eyes, they are simply lying in the churchyard, silently waiting (as in the lines quoted above), and they need the company she provides. Notably, the last four lines in this excerpt from “Ode” appear in the edition of Lyrical Ballads edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones in 1975; they are often omitted from later editions of the poem, although they can be found in this online version.
Literary Context: The Romantic Movement and Childhood
The publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and the famous Preface, which Wordsworth included in the second edition in 1800, marked the beginning of the Romantic period in English literature. This era is often dated 1798 to 1832, although Romantic poems were also written during the earlier part of the 1790s. In contrast to the Neoclassical period, which emphasized tradition, the Romantics valued innovation, and they prized the subjective elements in the creative process: emotion, feeling, intuition, and spontaneity. Evaluating personal experience was considered to be more important than following traditional thought or poetic models. In addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the leading English Romantic poets were William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.
Lyrical Ballads was important in establishing the new literary sensibility. Wordsworth did not use the traditional poetic diction favored by the 18th-century Neoclassical poets, instead adopting the simpler, everyday speech of the country folk who were for the most part the subjects of his poems. He explained in the Preface that among such people, “the essential passions of the heart [...] speak a plainer and more emphatic language [...] our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity” (Brett 245). Wordsworth went on to define poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (Brett 266).
Wordsworth was not the only Romantic poet to take an idealized view of children and childhood. Coleridge, Blake, and Shelley also expressed such a view. These poets not only appreciated youthful innocence and joyfulness, but also viewed children as possessing spiritual insight and a deep, instinctive connection to nature. “The Nightingale,” for example, one of the four poems that Coleridge contributed to Lyrical Ballads, ends with a passage about Coleridge’s son Hartley. Although Hartley is not yet two years old, his father believes that he possesses wisdom; the boy is captivated by the nightingale’s song and often puts his hand to his ear, asking the adults to listen to the bird’s song; he senses the wonder of nature. He is also enthralled by the sight of the moon.
Another example would be “The Battle of Blenheim,” a well-known ballad by Wordsworth’s friend, the poet Robert Southey. It was published in 1798, the same year as Lyrical Ballads, and it has a similar framework to “We Are Seven,” a poem that Southey certainly knew. Like the other poem, “The Battle of Blenheim” features a series of adult-child interactions. The two children it features exhibit an innocent moral concern about the victims of a long-ago battle that the adult, whose sensitivity has been blunted by the passage of the years, does not share. As with “We Are Seven,” the adult can learn something from the wisdom of children—if he is able to.
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) provides more examples. Many of the Songs of Innocence show the unselfconscious joy of children, who are always in touch with the spirit of the divine. The laughter and joy of the children is heard, for example, as they play in the woods in “Laughing Song” and “Nurse’s Song.” In contrast, Songs of Experience presents a harsher world, the product of a more limited, often callous and jaundiced point of view expressed by adults, which crushes the innocent beauty of the child’s world. Songs of Experience also has a “Nurse’s Song,” but in that poem the nurse who watches over the children has a miserable view of life and tells the children they are wasting their time playing. In the state of Experience, the children can only bemoan their fate—like the boy chimney sweeper in “The Chimney Sweeper“ who in addition to being forced into a dangerous, health-destroying occupation is left out in the cold while his parents go to church to pray.
In “We Are Seven,” the little girl’s perspective is similarly morally clear. She does not grieve the loss of her two siblings because she feels they are still present. However, when an adult pressurizes her to conform to his way of thinking, she begins to resemble the children in Songs of Experience, encountering the rules of an adult world that dictates its own truth and denies that any other points of view are valid.
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