Lucy Gray - Themes

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 deemphasizing 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."