She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways - Lucy

Lucy

Wordsworth wrote his series of "Lucy" poems during a stay with his sister Dorothy in Hamburg, Germany, between October 1798 and April 1801. The real life identity of Lucy has never been identified, and it is probable that she was not modeled on any one historical person. Wordsworth himself never addressed the matter of her persona, and was reticent about commenting on the series. Although a great detail is known of the circumstances and details of Wordsworth's life, from the time he spend during of his stay in Germany comparatively little record survives. Only one known mention from the poet that references the series survives, and that mentions the series only, and not any of the individual verses.

The literary historian Kenneth Johnson concluded that Lucy was created as the personification of Wordsworth's muse,

and the group as a whole is a series of invocations to a Muse feared dead. As epitaphs, they are not sad, a very inadequate word to describe them, but breathlessly, almost aware of what such a loss would mean to the speaker: 'oh, the difference to me!'

Writing in the mid-19th century, Thomas De Quincey said that Wordsworth,

always preserved a mysterious silence on the subject of that 'Lucy', repeatedly alluded to or apostrophised in his poems, and I have heard, from gossiping people about Hawkshead, some snatches of tragic story, which, after all, might be an idle semi-fable, improved out of slight materials.

Lucy's identity has been the subject of much speculation, and some have guessed that the poems are an attempt by Wordsworth to voice his affection for Dorothy; this line of thought reasoning that the poems dramatise Wordsworth's feelings of grief for her inevitable death. Soon after the series was completed, Coleridge wrote, "Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph / whether it had any reality, I cannot say. - Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die."

Reflecting on the importance and relevance of Lucy's identity, the 19th-century literary critic Frederic Myers said, "Here it was that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on Lucy. Of the history of that emotion, he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore, to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the poet's honour, I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets rightly? Or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone, Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever." According to Karl Kroeber,

Wordsworth's Lucy possesses a double existence, her actual, historical existence and her idealised existence in the poet's mind. The latter is created out of the former but neither an abstraction nor a conceptualisation, because the idealised Lucy is at least as "concrete" as the actual Lucy. In the poem, Lucy is both actual and idealised, but her actuality is relevant only insofar as it makes manifest the signifiance implicit in the actual girl.

Lucy is thought by others to represent his childhood friend Peggy Hutchinson, with whom he was in love before her early death in 1796—Wordsworth later married Peggy's sister, Mary.