Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems: An Ecofeminist Perspective

Ecofeminism as a movement embodies a philosophy that links feminism with ecology. It is believed that the term was coined by the French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book, Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminism connects the exploitation and domination of women to the environment, and argues that there is an association between Nature and women. A large and growing body of literature on Ecofeminism in the West relatesgender and environment mainly in ideological terms.Ecofeminists consider that this connection is illustrated through the traditionally ‘female’ values of reciprocity,nurturing and cooperation, which are present both among women and in nature. Ecofeminist theory interrogates orrejects previously held patriarchal paradigms and holds that the domination of women by men is intimately linked to thedestruction of the environment. This paper seeks to delineate the Ecofeminist angle in Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems. However during the Romantic Age there were no such theories as we see in the contemporary times, but a reading of the five Lucy Poems ascribe to the fact that apart from a hardcore Romantic, Wordsworth’s bent of mind was Ecofeminist too. The poems taken in this paper will try elaborating the fact, how Wordsworth as a poet was highly influenced by Nature, and how he blended the Nature with feminine understanding thereby creating a corpus of work that substantiates the fact, how much it is required that an understanding of life could be better done when itis seen in close connection to the women as well as Nature, because it is ultimately the harmony between the two, that can sustain human life.

Wordsworth’s treatment of women in his poetry was certainly influenced to a great extent by the women in his personal life. Women in his house had to perform two folds of duties: doing the laundry and taking dictation as well as laboring to make fair copies of manuscripts. In Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals we find an attestation of this fact as ladies like Dorothy, Mary Wordsworth, Mary’s sister Sara Hutchinson and later the Wordsworth’s daughter Dora and her friend Isabella Fenwick used to provide domestic and editorial help. But more important than all these was, perhaps the fact that these women were the source of inspiration for Wordsworth’s poetry. They were the ones who provided emotional and intellectual context in which he could write.

If these women had direct and positive impact on the creations of William Wordsworth, there are at least two more female figures that could have disturbed his conscience with a sense of guilt and empathy. Wordsworth’s abandonment of Annette Vallon, his first love, and their daughter Caroline are finally connected in his imagination to his feelings of abandonment by his mother (who died when he was eight) and to his lifelong fear of further loss. Thus, in his life, there is a paradoxical sense of abandonment as he had suffered the bereavement of his mother before he himself left Annette Vallon and Caroline. And it will not be improper to say that all these experiences with women shaped Wordsworth’s impression about women and his subsequent treatment of them in his poetry. That is why the grieving or abandoned women in his poetry- in the Lyrical Ballads, in "Laodamia," and in The Excursion- can be seen as expressions of guilt and empathy.

It is in theLucy Poemsthat the treatment of feminine as sensory and natural is reflected. Although, Lucy seems to be the central character, she is valued up to a certain point. The identity of Lucy has always been a debate. ‘Who was Lucy?’ There is no answer to this question except to say that it is extraneous. Lucy may or may not have been inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth, by Annette Vallon, or by another young woman. Whoever Lucy is, she remains a mysterious figure. But this mysterious figure of Lucy is always seen in the relation of Nature and a reading of the Lucy poems time and again show how Wordsworth was trying to deliver a message through connecting Lucy with Nature around her.

Throughout the ages, Wordsworth has been appreciated as a true believer in an extraordinary power of Nature. To him, it is not only beautiful; it has also the power to influence human life in an unimaginable but positive way. In those poems of his, where Nature is the centre of focus, his philosophy regarding women is not at all absent. To show this, he has first brought into discussion the theory of Edmund Burke.

Nature, for Burke, possesses both ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’ aspects. And they have their distinct impacts on the mind of man. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke, attempting to define the experience of sublime, “spoke of an experience of a power that exceeds the quantifiable and the usable” (Day, 1996: 183). This power evokes pain and terror rather than pleasure and love in our mind. The viewer is awe-stricken and what he feels can only be termed as ‘terrifying thrill’ which is the result of something grand and commanding. As examples of ‘sublime’ Burke has cited those that can produce an impression of infinity: “in natural phenomena and in human constructions, whose dimensions, particularly along the vertical line, are huge and grand: in the overwhelming mass of mountains or in deep dark caves, in soaring buildings, particularly ruins, or even in poetry (such as that in the Old Testament or in Homer) which celebrates the superhuman or the divine” (Day, 1996: 184). And the ultimate sublime object, for Burke, is God. As opposed to masculine gendering of sublime, things which are beautiful have been termed by Burke as feminine and are of a lesser order than sublime.

Nature seen in these respect, when got the feminine attributes and a female character to voice forward its valuable existence made Wordsworth’s poetry sublime.In “Tintern Abbey” he is thankful to Nature for all its gifts-‘sensations sweet’ during the weary hours of city life in London, ‘tranquil restoration’ that passed into his mind and made it purer or feelings of ‘unremembered pleasure’ that made him perform ‘acts of kindness and of love’. But above everything, he values most ‘that blessed mood’- an ‘aspect more sublime’.Nature was, for him, not only to gratify his senses and provide him pleasure; rather, it was, for him, endowed with a presence- a presence of something divine. That is why, it will not be wrong to say that the experience of Nature used to take him to the pinnacle of sublimity since a divine being, perhaps God Himself, used to be reflected in his eyes.

The Lucy Poemsare written from the point of view of a lover who has long viewed the object of his affection from afar, and who is now affected by her death. Yet Wordsworth structured the poems so that they are not about any one person who has died; instead they were written about a figure representing the poet’s lost inspiration. Lucy is Wordsworth’s inspiration, and the poems as a whole are, according to Wordsworth biographer Kenneth Johnston, “invocations to a Muse feared dead”. Lucy is represented in all five poems as sexless; it is unlikely that the poet ever realistically saw her as a possible lover. Instead, she is presented as an ideal and represents Wordsworth’s frustration at his separation from Coleridge.

Wordsworth’s voice slowly disappears from the poems as they progress, and his voice is entirely absent from the fifth poem. His love operates on the subconscious level, and he relates to Lucy more as a spirit of nature than as a human being. From an Ecofeminist angle if we observe these five Lucy Poemswe can very well say that these poems were not only the musings of the poet, but his attempt to bring woman and nature in one strong frame, so as to impart the valuable doctrine that it is in the close harmony and understanding of the two that mankind can have a better destiny.The poet’s anguish is confidential, and he is unable to fully explain its source.When Lucy’s lover is present, he is completely immersed in human interactions and the human aspects of nature, and the death of his beloved is a total loss for the lover. The 20th-century critic Spencer Hall argues that the poet represents a “fragile kind of humanism”.

Lucy is presented as character connected to nature who exists in a state between the spiritual and human; similar to a mythical nymph. However, she represents a state of consciousness and exists within the poem as part of the narrator’s consciousness.“Strange fits” is probably the earliest of the poems and revolves around a fantasy of Lucy’s death. It describes the narrator’s journey to the cottage of Lucy and his thoughts along the way. Throughout, the motion of the moon is set in opposition to the motion of the speaker. The poem contains seven stanzas, and a relatively elaborate structure which underscores his undecided attitude towards Lucy’s imagined death. The constant shifts in perspective and mood reflect his conflicting emotions.The first stanza, with its use of dramatic phrases such as “fits of passion” and “dare to tell”, contrasts with the subdued tone of the rest of the poem.

The presence of death is felt throughout the poem, although it is mentioned explicitly only in the final line. The moon, a symbol of the beloved, sinks steadily as the poem progresses, until its abrupt drop in the penultimate stanza. That the speaker links Lucy with the moon is clear, though his reasons are unclear. The moon nevertheless plays a significant role in the action of the poem: as the lover imagines the moon slowly sinking behind Lucy’s cottage, he is entranced by its motion. By the fifth stanza, the speaker has been lulled into a somnambulistic trance—he sleeps while still keeping his eyes on the moon (lines 17–20). When the moon abruptly drops behind the cottage, the narrator snaps out of his dream, and his thoughts turn towards death. Lucy, the beloved, is united with the landscape in death, while the image of the retreating, entrancing moon is used to portray the idea of looking beyond one’s lover.The darker possibility also remains that the dream state represents the fulfillment of the lover’s fantasy through the death of the beloved. In falling asleep while approaching his beloved’s home, the lover betrays his own reluctance to be with Lucy.

Wordsworth made numerous revisions to each of the Lucy Poems.The earliest version of “Strange fits” appears in a December 1798 letter from Dorothy to Coleridge. This draft contains many differences in phrasing and does not include a stanza that appeared in the final published version. Wordsworth also removed from the final stanza the lines:

I told her this; her laughter light
Is ringing in my ears;
And when I think upon that night
My eyes are dim with tears.

This final stanza lost its significance with the completion of the later poems in the series, and the revision allowed for a sense of anticipation at the poem’s ending and helped draw the audience into the story of the remaining “Lucy poems”. Of the other changes, only the description of the horse’s movement is important: “My horse trudg’d on” becomes “With quickening pace my horse drew nigh”, which heightens the narrator’s vulnerability to fantasies and dreams in the revised version.

“She dwelt among the untrodden ways” presents Lucy as having lived in solitude near the source of the River Dove. According to literary critic Geoffrey Durrant, the poem charts her “growth, perfection, and death”. To convey the dignified, unaffected naturalness of his subject, Wordsworth uses simple language, mostly words of one syllable. In the opening quatrain he describes the isolated and untouched area where Lucy lived, as well as her innocence and beauty, which he compares to that of a hidden flower in the second. The poem begins in a descriptive rather than narrative manner and it is not until the line “When Lucy ceased to be” that the reader is made aware that the subject of the verse has died. Literary scholar Mark Jones describes this effect as finding the poem is “over before it has begun”, while according to writer Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), Lucy “is dead before we so much as heard of her”.

Lucy’s “untrodden ways” are symbolic of both her physical isolation and the unknown details of her thoughts and life. The third quatrain is written with an economy intended to capture the simplicity the narrator sees in Lucy. Her femininity is described in girlish terms. This has drawn criticism from those who see the female icon, in the words of literary scholar John Woolford, “represented in Lucy by condemning her to death while denying her the actual or symbolic fulfillment of maternity”. To evoke the “loveliness of body and spirit”, a pair of complementary but paradoxical images are employed in the second stanza: the solitary, hidden violetjuxtaposed to the publicly visible Venus and first star of evening.Wondering if Lucy more resembles the violet or the star, the critic Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994) concludes that while Wordsworth likely views her as “the single star, completely dominating [his] world, not arrogantly like the sun, but sweetly and modestly”, the metaphor is a conventional compliment with only vague relevance. For Wordsworth, Lucy’s appeal is closer to the violet and lies in her seclusion and her perceived affinity with nature.

Wordsworth’s influence of the traditional English folk ballad is evident in the metre, rhythm and structure of “She dwelt”. The narrator of the poem is less concerned with the experience of observing Lucy than with his reflections and meditations on his observations. Throughout the poem sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, a fact emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses. The critic Carl Woodring writes that “She dwelt" and the Lucy series can be read as elegiac as “sober meditation[s] on death”. He found that they have “the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology [I]f all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy Poemsare also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance”.

An early draft of “She dwelt” contained two stanzas which had been omitted from the first edition. The revisions exclude many of the images but emphasise the grief that the narrator experienced. The original version began with floral imagery, which was later cut:

My hope was one, from cities far,
Nursed on a lonesome heath;
Her lips were red as roses are,
Her hair a woodbine wreath.

A fourth stanza, also later removed, included an explanation of how Lucy was to die: “But slow distemper checked her bloom / And on the Heath she died.”

The last of the Lucy Poemsto be composed, “I travelled among unknown men”, was the only one not included in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Although Wordsworth claimed that the poem was composed while he was still in Germany, it was in fact written during April 1801. Evidence for this later date comes from a letter Wordsworth wrote to Mary Hutchinson referring to “I travelled” as a newly created poem.In 1802, he instructed his printer to place “I travelled” immediately after “A slumber did my spirit seal” in Lyrical Ballads, but the poem was omitted. It was later published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.

The poem has frequently been read as a declaration of Wordsworth’s love for his native England and his determination not to live abroad again:

‘Tis past, that melancholy dream!
Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
To love thee more and more. (lines 5–8)

The first two stanzas seem to speak of the poet’s personal experience, and a patriotic reading would reflect his appreciation and pride for the English landscape. The possibility remains, however, that Wordsworth is referring to England as a physical rather than a political entity, an interpretation that gains strength from the poem’s connections to the other Lucy Poems.Lucy only appears in the second half of the poem, where she is linked with the English landscape. As such, it seems as if nature joins with the narrator in mourning for her, and the reader is drawn into this mutual sorrow.

Although “I travelled” was composed two years after the other poems in the series, it echoes the earlier verses, in both tone and language. Wordsworth gives no hint as to the identity of Lucy, and although he stated in the preface to Lyrical Ballads that all the poems were “founded on fact”, knowing the basis for the character of Lucy is not necessary to appreciate the poem and understand its sentiment. 

“Three years she grew in sun and shower” was composed between 6 October and 28 December 1798. The poem depicts the relationship between Lucy and nature through a complex opposition of images. Antithetical couplings of words—“sun and shower”, “law and impulse”, “earth and heaven”, “kindle and restrain”—are used to evoke the opposing forces inherent in nature. A conflict between nature and humanity is described, as each attempt to possess Lucy. The poem contains both epithalamic and elegiac characteristics; Lucy is shown as wedded to nature, while her human lover is left alone to mourn in the knowledge that death has separated her from humanity.

Written in spare language, “A slumber did my spirit seal” consists of two stanzas, each four lines long. The first stanza is built upon even, soporific movement in which figurative language conveys the nebulous image of a girl who “seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years”. The second maintains the quiet and even tone of the first but serves to undermine its sense of the eternal by revealing that Lucy has died and that the calmness of the first stanza represents death. The narrator’s response to her death lacks bitterness or emptiness; instead he takes consolation from the fact that she is now beyond trials of life, and “at last ... in inanimate community with the earth’s natural fixtures”.The lifeless rocks and stones depicted in the concluding line convey the inevitability of Lucy’s death.

The five Lucy Poemsare often interpreted as representing Wordsworth’s opposing views of Nature as well as meditations on the cycle of life. They describe a variety of relationships between humanity and Nature. For example, Lucy can be seen as a connection between humanity and nature, as a “boundary being, nature sprite and human, yet not quite either. She reminds us of the traditional mythical person who lives, ontologically, an intermediate life, or mediates various realms of existence”.Although the poems evoke a sense of loss, they also hint at the completeness of Lucy’s life—she was raised by nature and survives in the memories of others. She became, in the opinion of the American poet and writer David Ferry (b. 1924), “not so much a human being as a sort of compendium of nature”, while “her death was right, after all, for by dying she was one with the natural processes that made her die, and fantastically ennobled thereby”.

In conclusion, it can be drawn that Wordsworth’s ultimate obsession lies with the sublimity of Nature which he worships, but he never avoids the feminine nature or the femininity in Nature.He has projected his women in such a way that although they do not maintain the dominance in terms of attitude but they are found to occupy the central position in the poems.Lucy Poems are the best examples of capturing the soul of Nature and seeing them through a feminine lens adds more to it.

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