A slumber did my spirit seal

"A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. It is usually included as one of his Lucy poems, although it is the only poem of the series not to mention her name. The poem is a mere eight lines long; two "stanzas."

During the autumn of 1798, Wordsworth travelled to Germany with his sister Dorothy and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From October 1798, Wordsworth worked on the first drafts for his "Lucy poems", which included "Strange fits of passion have I known", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" and "A slumber". In December 1798, Wordsworth sent copies of "Strange fits" and "She dwelt" to Coleridge and followed his letter with "A slumber". Eventually, "A slumber", was published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.

Unique amongst Lucy poems, "A slumber" does not directly mention Lucy. The decision by critics to include the poem as part of the series is based in part on Wordsworth's placing it in close proximity to "Strange fits" and directly after "She dwelt" in the Lyrical Ballads.

The Lucy poems fall within a genre of poems that includes Robert Herrick's lamentations on the death of young girls. Written in spare language, "A slumber..." consists of two stanzas, each four lines. The first is built upon an even, soporific movement in which figurative language conveys the nebulous image of a girl. The poem begins:

The second stanza maintains the quiet, even tone of the first, but serves to undermine the former's sense of the eternal by revealing that Lucy has, by the time of composition, died. The narrator's response to her death lacks bitterness or emptiness; and instead takes consolation from the fact that she is now beyond life's trials:

Lucy is an isolated figure in which the narrator responds to her death. The beginning of the poem, according to Wordsworth biographer Mary Moorman, depict a "creative sleep of the senses when the 'soul' and imagination are most alive." This idea appears in other poems by Wordsworth, including Tintern Abbey. The space between stanza one and stanza two depicts a transition of Lucy from life into death. The two stanzas also show that Lucy, a being connected intrinsically to nature, dies before she can attain her own distinct consciousness apart from nature. However, as literary critic Geoffrey Hartman explains, "Growing further into consciousness means a simultaneous development into death [...] and not growing further also means death (animal tranquillity, absorption by nature)." The lifeless rocks and stones described in the concluding line convey the finality of Lucy's death. Boris Ford argues that within the second stanza as "the dead girl is now at last secure beyond question, in inanimate community with the earth's natural fixtures." Coleridge, in a letter to Thomas Poole, states, "Whether it had any reality I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment when his sister might die."

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