![]() when loved ones die they may continue to ‘watch over’ us from heaven, and thus the connection between us and them is not severed entirely). Yet at the same time, hers is a view consistent with the teachings of Christianity, which most people in Britain believed in the late eighteenth century (i.e. It may be true that the little girl or ‘Maid’ has insufficient understand of the true nature of death, and that she hasn’t thought deeply enough about it, or had enough life experience, to grasp its finality and horror. Yet at the same time, given Wordsworth’s views expressed elsewhere about the superior vision of childhood innocence over the jaded pragmatism of adulthood, there’s a sense in which Wordsworth is inviting us to mock him as the speaker of his poem, for his blinkered and rather uncharitable refusal to see the girl’s point of view. ‘We Are Seven’ stages a conversation between the poet and a little girl who is too innocent to understand the true nature of death: that it represents a separation between us who remain in the land of the living and those who have passed on and gone to ‘heaven’. Wordsworth throws up his hands in frustration: if they’re dead – this is the first time he’s actually used this word – then how can she continue to number these two lost siblings among the family? But the girl stands her ground: ‘Nay, we are seven!’ If John and Jane are in heaven, how many are you, really? But the girl replies, consistently, ‘we are seven.’ Like a bad maths teacher trying to get a pupil to solve an arithmetical problem, Wordsworth presses his question once more. Playing by Jane’s grave was her and John’s way of keeping their sister part of the family. The girl’s reference to ‘God’ releasing Jane ‘of her pain’ indicates a strong belief in Christianity, which helps to explain her outlook: if God took Jane (and then John) into heaven, they are both still ‘with’ their sister, in spirit form. The girl and her brother John played around their sister’s grave, as if poor Jane were still playing with them. The girl tells Wordsworth that her sister, Jane, was the first to die (of some unspecified illness). ![]() ‘And when the ground was white with snow, She even eats her supper there at their graveside. The girl tells Wordsworth that she often sings a song to her dead siblings, as she knits stockings and hems handkerchiefs over their graves. As far as she’s concerned, they’re still part of the family. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’, the old proverb has it but they are not out of sight, and so remain in the girl’s thoughts. Such infant or child mortality was a sad reality in this period.Īnd what’s more, the girl can see her brother and sister’s graves from the cottage where she lives. It’s hardly surprising that, of her six siblings, two of them have perished. It’s worth remembering that life in rural communities was tough in the eighteenth century, with no welfare state and a system of poor relief which was patchy at best.Īnd there were plenty of diseases, from smallpox to cholera to tuberculosis, which could carry off children before they even reached adulthood. The graves of her dead brother and sister are ‘green’, implying they are fresh and her siblings have only recently died. ‘Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,īut the girl is having none of it. ![]() ‘Their graves are green, they may be seen,’ ‘What about those two siblings of yours you mentioned who lie dead in the churchyard? You can’t count them among your number, so you’re really five, not seven.’ As if to prove his point, he points out to her that she runs about the place and is clearly alive, but her unfortunate siblings in the churchyard are not. If two of their family of seven live away from them, at Conwy (which is quite a distance from Herefordshire), and two other have gone away to sea, how can she say ‘we are seven’? Surely they’re three, if four members of their family have moved away and don’t live with them any more?Īgain, Wordsworth shows little tact and drives home his line of questioning. Perhaps less than diplomatically, Wordsworth probes this information further, questioning the girl’s logic. The girl lives with her mother in the cottage of the churchyard. And two others, the girl’s brother and sister, are in the churchyard, so are dead. Conwy, in north Wales, and two have gone away to sea, presumably as sailors. But when Wordsworth asks for more details (which is rather nosy of him – one wonders what a child would do these days if a strange man started expressing such an interest in her life), she answers that two ‘dwell’ or live ‘at Conway’, i.e.
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