A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stone, and trees.
One of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, which seems to describe a Taoist view of Lucy’s passing, her reunion with the natural world, flowing back to elemental molecules, the physical self again becoming part of organic nature.
The spiritual sense of the poem is more difficult to describe. ‘Diurnal’ implies a daily or regular cycle – the spirit and the body reintegrated with nature. Wordsworth has been described as a pantheist, with the usual Western urge to label everyone and everything, but the truth is beyond a label. At least he hasn’t got Lucy ascending the stairs to the light, or sitting in the clouds with the angels – Wordsworth is a practical and genuine poet, and wrote about nature without recourse to Classical Myths or standard Christian icons.
Lucy is dead, but Lucy still ‘is’. Beautiful.
