Lucy Gray

Background

The poem was inspired by Wordsworth being surrounded by snow, and his sister's memory of a real incident that happened at Halifax. Wordsworth explained the origins when he wrote, "Written at Goslar in Germany in 1799. It was founded on a circumstance told me by my Sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body however was found in the canal." Lucy Gray was first published in Volume 2 of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.

Poem

Lucy Gray is generally not included with Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, even though it is a poem that mentions a character named Lucy. The poem is excluded from the series because the traditional "Lucy" poems are uncertain about the age of Lucy and her actual relationship with the narrator, and Lucy Gray provides exact details on both. Furthermore, the poem is different than the "Lucy" poems in that it relies on narrative storytelling and is a direct imitation of the traditional 18th century ballad form.

Themes

Bennett Weaver points out that "The dominant theme of the poems of 1799 is death: death for the children of the village school, for Matthew's daughter, and for Lucy Gray", and Mary Moorman believes that Lucy Gray is the "most haunting of all his ballads of childhood". Lucy Gray, like the Lucy of the Lucy poems and Ruth of Wordsworth's "Ruth" are, according to H. W. Garrod, part of "an order of beings who have lapsed out of nature – the nature of woods and hills – into human connections hardly strong enough to hold them. Perpetually they threaten to fall back into a kind of things or a kind of spirits."

Wordsworth is trying to describe how Lucy, a girl connected to nature, dies. She is part of nature, according to Robert Langbaum, because Wordsworth "makes the human figure seem to evolve out of and pass back into the landscape". Henry Crabb Robinson explains that Wordsworth's point "was to exhibit poetically entire solitude, and he represents the child as observing the day-moon, which no town or village girl would ever notice". However, her connection with nature makes it is possible that Lucy's spirit is able to survive. The feeling in Lucy Gray, as John Beer writes, is counter to the feeling in "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" that "No amount of dwelling on her significance as an embodiment of life-forces can reduce by one iota the dull fact of her death and the necessary loss to all who love her."

Wordsworth wrote, in reference to Lucy Gray, "the way in which the incident was treated and the spiritualizing of the character might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to throw over common life with Crabbe's matter of fact style of treating subjects of the same kind". By this, Raymond Havens points out, Wordsworth is trying to pull away from realism into a state dominated by the imagination. To Wordsworth, the imagination was connected to both ethics and aesthetics, and he sought to exalt the imagination in Lucy Gray. Paul De Man believes that there is a "loss of name in the Lucy Gray poems where death makes her into an anonymous entity". However, some critics, like Mark Jones, believe that, in arguing for "a more general symbolic or literary value for Lucy Gray" or deemphasising Lucy Gray's identity as an individual, a critic "obliterates her status as human pure and simple, or, what is the same, underrates the importance of this status."

Reception

William Blake marked the poems Lucy Gray, "Strange fits", and "Louisa" with an "X", which provoked Jones to write, "The award for minimalist commentary must go to William Blake". Matthew Arnold believed that Lucy Gray was "a beautiful success" when contrasting how it is able to emphasise an incorporeal side of nature, and he believed that the poem "The Sailor's Mother" was "a failure" for its lack of the incorporeal. However, Swinburne believed that "The Sailor's Mother" was "the deeper in its pathos, the more enduring in its effect, the happier if also the more venturous in its simplicity".

A. C. Bradley believes that "there is too much reason to fear that for half his readers his 'solitary child' is generalised into a mere 'little girl,' and that they never receive the main impression he wished this is very wrong where is the actual theme written to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which gives even to this ballad the visionary touch".