3rd year SHE DWELT AMONG UNTRODDEN WAYS, by William Worsworth (Poem 85 in Song of Ourselves)

Before reading this poem, google photographs of the Lake District in England, so that you may visualize the home region of this marvellous Romantic poet. One of the nicest places I have ever visited...

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth, in the heart of the Lake
District, England. If you have taken the trouble of "visiting" the Lake District, as suggested above, you´ll find it easier to understand this poem.

The title in fact is not really a title but the first line of the poem...think of the suggestion of the use of the past tense, dwelt, and the fact that the ways were untrodden..

Read the first verse again, and then consider these questions:

What details emphasise her remoteness? Is this a sad picture? Why have some critics called her ‘a child of Nature’?
Scrutinise the small words in the first line, which might easily be taken for granted and consider the following questions: Why does Wordsworth write among, for example, rather than by?
How can ways be untrodden?

You may need to know that in:

Line 2: Dove: name of a river. It is probably not profitable to specify which Dove this
is. The Wordsworths went back to live in Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the English
Lake District. There is a Dovedale in the Lake District, but there is a more famous
River Dove in Derbyshire. Clearly the poet wishes the reader to imagine a very
remote area. The symbolic associations of the dove(white bird symbolizing peace, purity?) might also be borne in mind.
Line 3: Maid: a girl; a young (unmarried) woman.

Now look carefully at the rhyme scheme, the line lengths, the vocabulary and structure of the sentences and then discuss what is, or seems, simple about it in your view. (Make sure you understand the difference between simple and simplistic. Wordsworth might have been
striving for a simple effect; but this does not mean he wished his verse to be simplistic.)

2nd stanza

Line 7: the star might be Venus which often as the Evening Star is the only one
shining in the sky, because of its relative brightness

Consider the images in the second stanza. What qualities of the violet does Wordsworth emphasise by his description of it? What other associations might a ‘mossy stone’ have? In what ways is the image of the star different to the image of the violet, and what is the effect of this contrast in the poem? Look back at your feelings from your reading of the first stanza. How are you affected by the second stanza?
• Instead of saying 'died', Wordsworth uses the phrase, 'ceased to be'. Does
this phrase make a greater impact? Discuss and explain your thoughts when you meet your classmates on Tuesday.
• What is the effect of the positioning of ‘oh’ at this point in the poem? What is the meaning of the phrase, ‘The difference to me’? Does it say more than that he misses her? Explain their thoughts.
• Read the poem again two or three times to yourselves and try to express in your own way what makes it a special and haunting poem, and why you think so many readers over more than two hundred years have found it so memorable.

Read the following, see if it gives you more clues

This short, apparently simple poem has teased a succession of scholars and critics from the time it was written in 1798-9 to the present day. It might be best not to enquire too far into who Lucy was, if indeed she was a real person at all. Wordsworth wrote it when he and his sister, Dorothy, accompanied his poet friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to Germany shortly after they had collaborated in the writing of their amazingly original Lyrical Ballads. It is one of a group of poems, known as the Lucy poems.

Thematic links with set poems
Mortality: Rising Five; Before the Sun
Nature and humanity: Before the Sun; Farmhand

N.B.These thematik links are included for you to go back to once we have dealt with all of them. The following students were present when we discussed these in class, you can always consult these "helpers" (Thanks Julian Santiago PIntos, Agustina Polizza Gol, Juan Ignacio Nachon and Sofia Belgrano!!!)