I liked all of Wordsworth’s poems, but the Lucy poems stood out to me the most (besides Tintern Alley). In the first, “Strange fits of passion have I known,” he tells us of traveling to Lucy’s home, and creates an atmosphere of languorous daydreaming, backed by the clopping of his horses hooves. “Upon the moon I fix’d my eye,/all over the wide lea;/My horse trudg’d on…”, then mentions the paths, the orchard plot, the hill leading up to Lucy’s house. By focusing on the landmarks and mentioning his horse moving on, “hoof after hoof he rais’d and never stopp’d:” we are lulled into the same dream that the speaker mentions in the fifth stanza. We follow the moon with him, which is slowly descending, and by the time the speaker has reached Lucy’s cottage, the moon is hidden behind it, and he fancies that Lucy has died.
This poem is centered on creating a mood, using the slow progress of the speaker, and the onward trudging of his horse through lea, path, orchard, and hill. Wordsworth gives us the symbol of the moon, which represents Lucy, and its slow descent until hidden from view, being Lucy’s death. Lucy and the moon are one, and he has her in his thoughts through his whole journey.

In the second poem, “Song”, we get an idea of Lucy herself as a lonely woman, “A Maid whom there were none to praise/And very few to love.” She is to Wordsworth a symbol of delicate beauty, barely known (“A Violet by a mossy stone/Half hidden from the Eye). He laments her passing as making a grave difference to him.

In “Three years she grew in sun and shower”, Wordsworth’s love of Nature stands out. Nature has made Lucy a template of the perfect woman, and reclaimed her, through death, to be company to Herself. Lucy has become Spirit, is given new life by Nature, and is made more beautiful, more mysterious, than she could have been in physical life. She attains the “calm of mute insensate things,” grace by the “motions of the storm”, gains stature from good feelings. Wordsworth’s loneliness at the end of the poem--“she died, and left to me/this heath, this calm and quiet scene, the memory of what has been,/and never more will be,” --is tempered by his knowing that she is a part of all things, and that he can be near her anytime simply by going outside. This poem seems to be the one where he has accepted her death.


In “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth separates the World from the Natural. The World is an entity which decreases Man’s appreciation of Nature. By “Getting and spending, we decrease our powers,” meaning that we dull ourselves, and that we deny God’s inheritance—being one with Nature. He personifies Sea and Wind, so we view them as beings, ones which we ignore and for which we “are out of tune.” this makes Wordsworth sad, and wishes he could see the real spirits of Nature, like Proteus and Triton, to comfort him and place him back in the realm of what he perceives as being most important-the spiritual.