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Detailed Summary

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal is one of the five Lucy Poems, a cluster of
elegies about the death of a young girl named Lucy (though she remains
unnamed in this poem) which brings to Wordsworth the realization that
bad things can happen in a beautiful world. In this poem, the poet seems
to be immortalizing Lucy‟s death as he describes and appreciates life
beyond death.

The poem is a mere eight lines long; two “stanzas.” The first stanza
reveals the poet‟s innocent unawareness about the fact that one day Lucy
too would age or meet her death like other human beings. The second
stanza deals with her death that has made her motionless, forceless, and
without the faculties of sight and hearing. However, the poet is at peace

even after losing Lucy to death because he finds that she has become an
inseparable part of the earth by mingling with the rocks, the stones, and
the trees.

The opening lines of the poem tell us about the poet himself. “A slumber
did my spirit seal” could mean that the speaker is in some sort of a

lethargic state, as if he isn‟t living in reality but rather in fantasy. This
„slumber‟ transports him to a state of unawareness which keeps away all
his human fears like the fact that age and death spare none, not even his
dear Lucy.

However, the poet soon encounters the hard fact that the young girl has

passed away. He does not address the matter directly perhaps because
the pain and agony that he is because of her death is far too overwhelming
for him to even mention it in a direct manner.

The lines “No motion has she now, no force;” tell us how she is lying still,

how she is now an inanimate object, devoid of life. In this way the poet
subtly implies that she had once been an energetic person, not one to stay
put in one place for long. When he writes about her current lack of senses
he also implies that the woman might have been one to live life fully, using
all of her senses to enjoy each day. He emphasizes how she can no longer
enjoy the world through sight or sound by stating that she can no longer
see, hear or move; she doesn‟t have power.