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.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem consists almost entirely of quatrains, or four-line stanzas. There are 16 quatrains followed by the final stanza, which consists of five lines rather than four. Each stanza is in iambic meter. An iambic foot comprises an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The stanza alternates tetrameter lines, consisting of four feet (Lines 1 and 3) with trimeter lines, comprising three feet (Lines 2 and 4):
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair,
—Her beauty made me glad (Lines 9-12).
This type of stanza is called a ballad stanza; in such stanzas usually only the second and the fourth line rhyme, but Wordsworth adapted the popular form to suit his own preferences.
Wordsworth varies the meter slightly on a number of occasions. In a few lines, he substitutes a trochee for an iamb in the first foot. A trochee consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as in “Sisters and brothers” (Line 13) and “Quick was the little Maid’s reply” (Line 63).
Rhyme
The rhyme scheme is ABAB, that is, Line 1 rhymes with Line 3, and Line 2 rhymes with Line 4 in each stanza. The rhymes are mostly perfect rhymes, meaning that in the two rhymed words, different consonants are followed by identical vowel sounds, as the following stanza shows:
‘And where are they? I pray you tell.’
She answered, ‘Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea’ (Lines 17-20).
There are only two exceptions to this pattern. First, Stanza 1 has an abbreviated first line that does not rhyme with Line 3, which is also unrhymed. Second, in the final stanza, which has five lines rather than four, the first line is unrhymed, while the remaining four lines follow a different pattern than the established one. The stanza’s rhyme scheme can therefore be presented as ABCCB.
There are also two instances of internal rhyme, that is, a rhyme that occurs within a single line. “Their graves are green, they may be seen” (Line 37), and, “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door” (Line 39). The internal rhyme has the effect of making the two dead children seem connected to their sister and mother.
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By William Wordsworth
