Natural Communion

Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” is a surprisingly innocent and sweet poem surrounding the idea of death. In it, Wordsworth tells of a little girl’s connection to her late siblings, and relates it to human connection with nature. The innocence of a child is often thought of as natural, and the child this speaker addresses is “a little cottage girl” with “a rustic, woodland air.” The child, in her youthful and wild state, is closer with the natural world. As the poem continues, the reader learns that she is also close with her siblings who “in the church-yard lie.” She refuses to reduce her number of siblings, insisting that they are seven even though two have passed away. As a poet who loved nature, Wordsworth may be suggesting that those connected closely with nature are also connected with the dead in a way that most do not understand. He allows the child to have the last word in the poem, as she again says, “Nay, we are seven!” This suggests the authority of the child’s statement, as if she knows a truth that the readers and speaker have forgotten.

The graves in this poem are not described as frightening or ominous. Instead, they are “green” and close to the home, as if the departed children never truly left. The little girl spends time with her siblings, communing with the graves as she sits in the grass and sings to them. From this perspective, death is as natural as the environment itself, and there is little to prevent the little girl from being with the dead. The poem is somewhat reassuring, perhaps suggesting that as long as humans, dead or alive, are all a part of nature, nothing can separate them.