In William Wordsworth's lyrical poem "Lucy Gray," a young girl ventures out into a stormy night and is never seen again. Rife with eerie imagery of nature, the poem links Lucy's presumed death with the idea that she lives on through nature. A similar event happened to Wordsworth's sister, so the poem holds even greater meaning as a possible coping mechanism Wordsworth wrote to indirectly immortalize his sister not only through words, but imply that life does not completely end in death, but rather continues on through nature.
In the poem, Lucy originally goes out into the storm to light the way for her mother when she returns home. When the search party goes looking for Lucy, "the Mother spied/ The print of Lucy's feet." Lucy ends up leading her mother after all as the search party tracks her footprints "downward from the steep hill's edge," "through the broken hawthorn-hedge," "by the long stone-wall," and "(across) an open field." Lucy goes through all the aspects of nature but is barred by the manmade stone wall that she does not cross but only walks beside. She is essentially already one with nature and when her footsteps disappear in the middle of the bridge, she is disappearing on a man made item. The bridge, of course, can symbolize a variety of things, the most obvious being the bridge between life and death; or man's interruption of nature. Lucy presumably doesn't die from the weather, but rather the bridge is what causes her death, probably from slipping off.
The fact that Lucy's footsteps are still visible in the snow, the comparison of Lucy to "the Fawn at play" and "The Hare upon the Green," and Wordsworth's final stanzas depicting Lucy as "sweet Lucy Gray/ Upon the lonesome Wild," all indicates that she has a strong relationship with nature that transcends and even extends life. She lives on in the woods, not hauntingly as the Gothics would prefer, but instead happily, singing, whistling, and never looking back. Lucy is essentially just as alive at the end of the poem as she was in the beginning.
Great reading of the poem--I especially like how you draw attention to the man-made barriers in the poem. Hedges and stone walls are emblems of enclosure of the common land in the 18th century, a process that dispossessed the working people from their ability to use and profit from land technically belonging to the king. One important qualification: William's sister Dorothy is indeed the model for the girl in the "Lucy poems" (most of which we read for today), but she did not die (she actually lived with William and his wife Mary for her entire life). So, we might see the poem as immortalizing a particular view of the world that Dorothy had (she was known for having a close connection to nature and for her great powers of observation).
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