Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Where is Lucy?
In William Wordsworth's poem "Lucy Gray," he creates the story of a young girl who disappears in a snowstorm, causing her family to go searching for her with little hope. The ballad is bleak and heart-wrenching as the mother follows her young daughter's footprints but fails to bring her home, and yet the final stanzas give a trace of hope with the words "Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living Child." This verse could have easily have been more haunting, saying something along the lines of "To this day, her spirit dwells in the midsts forever searching for her family..." (which would certainly give it more of a Gothic influence) but instead it claims that she could be alive. Could this futile optimism be to spare the reader the idea of the death of a child? Is it even optimism at all? The idea of Lucy being alive or at the very least having her spirit still lost in the wild could either be interpreted as her being apart of nature now and being preserved as an innocent child, or it could be seen as her being forever lost and ignorant much like in Purgatory. Innocence and ignorance seem to hand-in-hand when it comes to the bliss of naivete but Wordsworth is well aware that there is nothing blissful about a child being lost in the height of a snowstorm. He based the poem on a real story of a girl who got lost in a snowstorm and was later found drowned in a canal. Rather than tell that story and give Lucy a conclusive and finite ending, he gives the story a certain vagueness that is looming. Should we feel hopeful or haunted?
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I think Wordsworth wants us to feel both hopeful and haunted. Maybe even haunted by our hope, which I realize sounds rediculous. Hoping for something can be alot like being haunted, it's this heavy weight on your shoulders that follows you and won't go away. I think not knowing what happens to Lucy adds to the gothic element, even if Wordsworth appears to be giving us a flicker of hope at the end. The mystery of the situation is a very gothic element and the way he writes the last 2 stanzas gives a sense darkness in the subtext. I agree with you that Wordsworth could completely alter the context of the poem by rewritng the last couple of stanzas in a more positive fashion. In my opinion Wordsworth had a reason for writing them the way he did, making the poem more sinister, and therefore more gothic. Poets always seem to have a reason for doing what they do, even if it's not apparent to the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the idea of her being in a literal sense of "aliveness" is less gothic and more modern. I feel like if we were reading in during the time of its publication would instantly gravitate towards ghosts.However maybe we are also reaching into the authors mind. In the context of the death of his sister, maybe this is his way of being in denial after her death.
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