The Motif of Death in the "Lucy Poems". Its Representation and Relation to the Stages of Grief

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, RWTH Aachen University (Anglistisches Institut), course: Proseminar: Romantic Poetry, language: English, abstract: The term "Lucy Poems" includes five poems written by the romantic poet William Wordsworth which, traditionally, are grouped in literary studies because they seeminglycreate an "extraordinary unity". Yet the poet did not intendthem to be sequenced. As a consequence, there is uncertainty about which and how many poems could be considered as a "Lucy Poem" or not. One has found a conventional solution or compromise declaring Wordsworth's "Strange fits ofPassion have I known", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways", "I travelled among unknown men", "Three years she grew in sun and shower" and "A slumber did my spirit seal" to be the"Lucy Poems". I will base my investigations on this grouping.During the poet's time in Goslar, the German harvest and winter put Wordsworth in a pensive mood and "he turned [...] to thoughts of death, represented in his poetry by an elegiac strainfar stronger than any of the varieties of sentimental morality it replaced". The "Lucy Poems" arose out of this gloomy mood and can be described as "poems of homesickness". Four of these poems, namely "Strange fits", "She dwelt", "A slumber" and "Three years" were published in the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads in 1800. The fifth one, "I travelled" was published later.Only in the later edition of the Lyrical Ballads published of 1815, Wordsworth rearranged all five poems as he divided his poetry into "Poems Founded on the Affections" and "Poems ofthe Imagination". "Strange fits", "She dwelt" and "I travelled" belong to the first group whilst "Three years" and "A slumber" were integrated into the latter. As the "Lucy Poems" are seen as a "sober meditation on death or a subject related to death" this link between the poems will be the subject of investigation in my seminar paper. Roughly summarizing the content of the poems, the speaker after somehow intuiting the passing away of his beloved Lucy meditates on her life and death. Since the representation of death in the "Lucy Poems" is linked to its counterpart, the representation of life, it is inevitable to naturally take a look at Lucy as a living creature of nature first.Examining the representation of Lucy's passing and its emotional impact on the speaker in the five poems I will then illustrate the gradual changing within the motif of death.[...]