Purity, Simplicity, and Loss in Wordsworth's "Song" Marine Bruno College

Wordsworth’s “Lucy Series” is a set of poems concentrating on a young woman, possibly a lover, and her death. “Song” focuses on the loneliness and underappreciation of Lucy after she has passed, although the content of the poem involves his feelings as it does her death. Little is said about Lucy’s personality, and the narrator only mentions her beauty and her alienation from society. The cyclical nature of the poem serves as a reminder of the cyclical nature of life and death, though the poem keeps a rather joyful tone in spite of the sorrowful subject. Wordsworth devises a three-quatrain format in an ABAB rhyme scheme and simple language of mostly one-syllable words that emphasize Lucy’s simplicity. The active imagery throughout the work establishes a ruthful vinculum between Lucy and nature, for she lived outside of the city.

Lucy is presented as an unknown character from the beginning, her anonymity setting the tone for the first stanza. Depicting her merely as “She” (1), Wordsworth refrains from revealing her name, maintaining the mystery of who she was. Beautiful imagery creates a locus amoenus, an idealized beautiful place, which happens to be a rural spot far away from society. The solitude limned through the imagery...