Lucy

“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” is the fourth of William Wordsworth’s five “Lucy” poems. Written in 1798, this simple, poignant ballad is a twelve line elegy to lost love.

Wordsworth wrote the Lucy poems while on a walking tour in Germany. Having set out with his sister Dorothy, fellow romantic poet Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and another friend, William and Dorothy found themselves wintering in the town of Goslar in the Harz mountains. Icy weather, isolation, little access to books, and a longing for home proved fertile ground for writing, as Dorothy records in her journal.

Though “beside the springs of Dove” possibly refers to the river Dove and beautiful Dovedale in the Peak District of England, the precise geography of the poem, and the identity of Lucy were never elucidated by Wordsworth.

Was she a real girl, loved and lost by Wordsworth in his youth? Was she an idealised dream of a girl at one with the natural world, in the same way Wordsworth aspired to be? Or was Lucy his sister Dorothy, and the poem an imaginative rendering of his desolation were he to lose her, his kindred spirit?

Tender, evocative and spare, the lyric is mysterious; the story it tells is of a hidden life, gracefully illuminated by a loving biographer.

• Jan Sellick, October 8th, 2020