We Are Seven

"We Are Seven" starts with the narrator questioning what a child could possibly know about death. The poem then becomes a dialogue between the narrator and a fair little girl who speaks of how many siblings she has. She declares, “Seven are we; / And two of us at Conway dwell, / And two are gone to sea. / “Two of us in the church-yard lie, / My sister and my brother” (18 – 22). The narrator then continues to question her about her siblings, hoping to make her understand that “If two are in the church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five.” (35 – 36). 

As the girl insists that she still has six other siblings, she also tells of the things that she does with them, meaning the things she does by their graves. She knits, hems, sings to them, and even eats by their grave. It seems as though she believes that her siblings are there with her or as if she is ignorant of what death means. What is also interesting about this is that she fully understands that her four other siblings, who are living elsewhere, are truly not with her, though still alive. This could mean that the little girl associates the physical body with where the spirit is at all times. As if her siblings are still with her because their graves are nearby. 

Wordsworth said in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that through this poem, he wanted to show the "utter inability” for a child to admit death. But what I found most interesting about the poem is that when looking at the dialogue closely, the child does understand that her sister “went away” (52) and that her brother was “forced to go” (59). 

The child isn't in denial of death necessarily, she just doesn't understand it the way the narrator does. She knows that death has taken her siblings from her, but since they are buried so near, they aren't truly gone. She may even have a deeper understanding that though they are dead, they are still her siblings and in the end she still declares “Nay, we are seven!” (69).

Wordsworth’s Transgressions

Last week I read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in light of Roland Barthes’ S/Z and discussed “transgressions of the binary.” With this idea still fresh in my mind, I ended up reading William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and the four poems from Lyrical Ballads in light of binaries and opposites interacting. I’m fascinated by Wordsworth’s presentation of opposites in a manner that ultimately avoids the Blakean bifurcation of enabling innocence and experience to co-mingle and, at the same time, maintain separate houses. Creating this sort of discursive force between opposites, in my reading of Wordsworth, depends on the action of the reader “who would find / A tale in every thing” (7-68).  The reader must act discursively; Wordsworth, the “man talking to men,” will not (299).

Wordsworth seems to anticipate the dictum of William Carlos William’s Paterson – “no ideas but in things” – when, in his Preface, Wordsworth states that poetry should involve moments, “whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (295). Wordsworth concerns himself with “common life…in a selection of language really used by men” while also “throw[ing] over them a certain colouring of imagination” (294-295). Rather than the common, Blake’s enterprise depends on the mythic, mystic, and supernatural; Wordsworth demands a thing-quality on the sensory level followed by a poetic patina that indicates the poet’s subtle guiding hand. In Blake, we are always aware of the poem’s Blakeness; in Wordsworth, the thing or subject typically takes center stage and it is only the magnificent mind of the speaker acting as a poetic lens which makes its presence known at the start and finish. Ironically, Blake’s speakers are not always Blake, whereas Wordsworth’s speakers, as he shows in his footnotes, are almost always Wordsworth, and his subjects are often based on real-life parallels or experiences (see footnote 1 of “Simon Lee” on 275 and footnote 1 of “We Are Seven” on 278 – “The Thorn,” via footnote 1 on 282, was born out of Wordsworth’s personal observation, but depends on a speaking ‘character’ – I’ll speak on this later).

Instead, Wordsworth sets up necessary opposites in “Simon Lee,” “We Are Seven,” and “Anecdote For Fathers.” I’ll go through some of these opposites to create a more specific elaboration of how he’s working the binary. The opposites are typically between speaker and subject. In “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote For Fathers,” the opposites are an adult speaker and a child subject, while in “Simon Lee” we read of a man who has become “old,” “little” and “lean” (3 and 33). Simon Lee has crossed the threshold of adulthood to become a child again (almost) in old age – childlike in the sense that he cannot perform the outward physical actions of grown men – yet he has, unlike the child subjects of “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote For Fathers,” become regretful for a life that cannot be regained, whereas the child subjects of the latter two poems still, with their lives ahead of them, brush aside complications of adulthood with straightforward answers – where the dead and the living are counted the same, or “at Kilve there was no weather-cock.”

Simon Lee, who is “sick,” has only a “few months of life has he in store / As he to you will tell” (33, 57 and 58). Simon Lee, unlike the child subjects, ends his poem in “tears” that the speaker interprets as a greater “mourning” for “gratitude of men” than that which comes from “hearts unkind” (89 and 93-96). While the speaker relates this feeling, he stands opposite to “this old Man doing all he could / To unearth the root of an old tree” (74-75). The action of uprooting comes easy to the speaker: “with a single blow / the tangled root I severed” (85-86). Able-bodied and full of life, the speaker makes a claim about Simon Lee toward the end of the poem but demands the reader (another binary here between speaker or writer and reader) to bring forth the tale, or, as he says makes a tale out of what, to the speaker, “is no tale” (72-73). While there is an interaction between opposites, the speaker demands that his other opposite – the reader – find the true tale, the true empathetic underpinning, in Simon Lee’s story, which to him (the speaker) is anything but apparent.

The child subjects turn this writer/reader interpretive relationship on the speaker himself, putting the speaker in the seat of the interpretive reader. In “We Are Seven,” the young girl insists on repeating the number of her siblings, although two “in the church-yard lie, / Beneath the church-yard tree” (31-32). The child, like the speaker of “Simon Lee,” sees nothing interesting or complicated about the content she’s presenting, and continues answering the speaker with her mantra “we are seven” (17, 30, 64, 69). Unlike the speaker of “Simon Lee,” the child appears to undergo no empathetic connection with the speaker, replying to him quickly both initially and at the end with the same answer (17 and 64). The speaker of “Simon Lee” arrives at some kind of understanding, though I wouldn’t say a transgression, with his subject. The speaker at the end of “We Are Seven” feels he is “throwing words away” in speaking to “the little Maid” (67-68). Just as the reader is put into the position of finding “a tale” or meaning at the end of “Simon Lee,” the speakers of “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote for Fathers” are required to interpret their subjects; yet the speaker of “We Are Seven” ultimately throws up his hands and stops his discourse with the child subject when his interpretative powers fail him.

In “Anecdote for Fathers,” the speakers claims “this is strange,” when his son is unable to explain why “at Kilve I'd rather be.” Yet, the speaker, in the poem’s ending, relates, “Could I but teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn,” in an empathetic reading and interpretative of his child subject, the son. Even if the reader doesn’t understand why the speaker finds himself so enraptured by the boy’s imagining, the idea that the speaker himself feels overjoyed with his five-year-old son’s musings completes the poem. The reader (in this case, the speaker) begins to interpretatively understand the mysterious (dare I say poetic) response of the child subject, and thus completes the contract between reader and writer without collapsing the two or transgressing the binary. In “We Are Seven,” the reader (in this case, you or I, the real-life readers) can perhaps grasp the child’s misunderstanding or simplification of death, but the speaker (in this case, the poet or the speaker) cannot understand the child, and even begins the poem by asking “What should it [a child] know of death?” (4). The opposites do not touch and the interaction between the two only serves to justify difference.

Again, the tension of these poems come from discourses between binaries, speaker/subject and reader/writer, though not, as Blake might have it, a combination of these forces or a transgression of the binary. The two poles stay separate, although they interact.

Wordworth’s Preface operates in a similar mindset, where the reader and the writer (poet) share “common” humanity but the poet remains distinct from the reader in his unique ability to cast the “colouring” of imagination. The poet distinctly understands the Proustian metonymic process “in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement” (295) and can fulfill this process through writing in an amplified manner, which the common person, despite his fierce, constant and close connection to “the real,” is unable to complete. Wordsworth avoids “poetic diction” to keep the company of “flesh and blood” (297), but claims the poet (therefore himself, William Wordsworth) as capable of the production of passions bearing “infinite complexity” (301). The Wordsworthian poet, while dwelling in the “real world” (real meaning rustic) “has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present” (299). Absence becomes presence to the poet, where the present thing (in all of its thing-ness) can be conjured up in absence, and then presented to the reader, as in “Simon Lee,” as a thing to be co-created by reader and writer, or taken by the reader and interpreted. The Wordsworthian poet’s work involves conjuring on the empty deep of the blank page, the absence becoming present through imagination.

I won’t discuss “The Thorn” for too long, although I like it because, in its difference, it throws a wrench into some of the ideas and analyses I posit above (or, at the very least, complicates them considerably). We have another binary, but our speaker is not Wordsworth, or at least he claims outright that this speaker is a “sufficiently common” character (282). The ghostly supernatural – both in terms of “the infant grave” and “the Woman in a scarlet cloak,” – seems contrary to the common, or the thingness so heavily emphasized in the other three poems (55 and 63). Yet the central subject is “The Thorn,” which is real, and Wordsworth marks his poem as an imaginative process to make this thorn a “more impressive object” – so the supernatural and hyper-imaginative and gothic are in service, ultimately, of the real (282). Of the pieces, “The Thorn” reads as the most Ballad-esque – the ambiguities and enigmas of the text narrative are somewhat resolvable (does Martha kill her child? What does the thorn represent?) – and the reader isn’t called upon for any great interpretative leaps, and no tale needs to be imagined to justify the story, unlike “Simon Lee.” Therefore, the poem becomes a distancing act between the speaker and the woman, or the speaker and the fantastical (which, in service of the real, functions then as a distancing between the speaker himself and the thorn). “Her face,” he says “was enough for me” (189). “I cannot tell;” he relates. “I wish I could” (89). The speaker is bound up in his subject and yet fails to approach it. The poem then ends, unlike the other three poems, with the subject speaking and not the speaker commenting on the subject (“We Are Seven” can be read this way, but by the end of “We Are Seven” the speaker seems so fed up with the poor child that her repetitive phrase is almost sillier or sadder than Martha’s haunting “misery” in “The Thorn). The subject is left isolated and the speaker subsumed in his inability to tell the story (or rather unwillingness to tell it). I still don’t know what to make of “The Thorn” but I think it would be sort of cheap to chalk it up to the structural reading I’ve given of the other three poems when it is, in structure, content, and voice, so different than them.

All this is to say that neither Blake nor Wordsworth are (or should be) reducible to these readings or questions of the binary: numerous examples exist even within similar poems of how these questions are complicated, and even if in Wordsworth’s Preface he seems to present a clearer, more singular notion of how his own poems function, their ambiguities and strangeness make them interesting; there are not interesting as pieces of evidence to support his poetic argument or as logical outpourings of his own polemic. Therefore the Preface makes for strange reading: here the poet seems to directly tell us what to anticipate in his poems and what philosophy the poems are exercising while referencing them throughout. He also affirms: “I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition” (299). I understand and empathize with the breaking down of this barrier (as a poet who also views prose and poetry in an unsuited oppositional binary) but it seems to undermine the essential quality of his lyrics, which is that of song. Prose cannot be sung, and most of these poems are billed as ballads. Why does Wordsworth spend so much time in his Preface on this question of prose and of poems? He is wrestling with the idea of getting away from “poetic diction,” but does this mean rushing into the arms of prose as a polis of common speech? These poems, with their repetitions, strict metres, stanzaic formations, and rhymes, do not seem opposed to prose, though they do retain the quality of song that most prose fails to find. Perhaps Wordsworth, like the subjects and speakers of these four poems, could not move from one side of the binary to another: he remained the writer, unable to fulfill the role of reader even when considering his own work.  

Wordsworth's Children: A Guide to the Natural

In the selections from Wordsworth we read for class, three out of the four poems have children at their forefront. In “Anecdote For Fathers” Edward, the son of the speaker, seems to answer his father’s question without thought, but when asked to give an explanation of his judgment he has none, showcasing his innocence. “The Thorn” contains the character of a dead child who remains unnamed, but lies at the heart of his mother’s guiltiness (or guiltlessness) and her woe, putting forth the idea of a child having power or control despite their absentness or feebleness. And in “We Are Seven” a little maiden insists to the speaker the inclusion of all of her siblings, disregarding that two have died, and embodying persistence. All of these children, despite their differing characteristics, promote and idea in Wordsworth’s work that children, through their unconditioned responses, have a direct link to the natural.  

Within “The Thorn” the dead child is connected inextricably with nature; he is characterized with the moss hill (210-11, 225-8) and the pond (217-18) and in embodying these landmarks, perpetuates his mother’s grief upon her  visiting. The child then can be said to create an incredibly animalistic grief in the mother, it being both the source of her dismay and the original source of her sanity, “the unborn infant wrought/ About its mother’s heart, and brought/ Her senses back again” (139-41). The child, once her sanity and now the impetus for her madness, creates a sadness in the woman that is devoid of any rationality that may have come through her maturity.

The young maiden in “We Are Seven” thus reacts to death in a natural sense, where it’s not accepted, but thwarted through relationship. She insists that the family is still seven because of her siblings’ graves’ proximity to her home saying that she knits her stockings, hems her kerchief, and sings (41-4) with them so, they are still part of the family. The speaker insists on the rational, pointing out over and over (and bordering on heartlessly) that her siblings are in fact dead and that her family is now five instead of seven, but the girl continues to reach for the natural, for the simple, for the fact that they are still a family because they are still “around” so to speak. The poem seems to be insisting that death, then, though natural, is a devastating occurrence because people insist on rationalizing the irrational, on quantifying the natural instead of accepting it as simply that, as something spatial and not irreconcilable.

And in “Anecdote For Fathers,” Edward unravels his father’s question of why by giving an explanation that isn’t an explanation, but simply an observation. Edward’s decision that he likes Kilve better than Liswyn farm is a decision made by instinct alone, denoted by his drawn out pause of four stanzas (37-52) when asked for an explanation. Then the weather cock comes like an epiphany, a revelation of nature, and the boy has what to him is a satisfactory answer because it is an answer. And the father praises this in the last stanza, wishing he could teach “the hundredth part/ Of what from thee I learn” (59-60), what he learns being that every question does not need a logical answer, but that nature itself will answer for us. In all of these poems, Wordsworth points at the base nature of the human through children, that rationality is something built atop nature not in its place.

“The Thorn”: A Requiem for a Lost Child

Mankind’s relationship with nature is a thematic subject that is at the forefront of “The Thorn.”  The poem concerns a woman who may or may not have killed her child.  Regardless of whether the child’s body lies on the mountaintop where she returns to weep, his character is represented in the story by nature.  “I cannot tell how this may be,” (32) the speaker says of the rumors of the mother’s possible murder of her child.  With the uncertainty over the mother’s role in her child’s death, the only evidence the speaker can rely on is the natural landscape.

            The poem suggests that the mountaintop and the child may be literally connected.  For example, there are rumors that the moss’s red color is from the blood of the child.  It is also said that the child can be seen in the pond, with a face that “looks at you” (218).  The child is therefore embedded in nature regardless of whether he is actually buried there.  The mountaintop is not only a “shrine” to the child – it has become the symbolic “child” because of the child’s literal absence.  The fact that the mountaintop has become the metaphorical “child” of the mother is clear from the language the speaker uses to describe the mountain.  For example, the thorn is said to be “no higher than a two year’s child” (5).

            The resilient thorn itself represents the mother’s curse, for she is doomed to return to the mountaintop every day to weep.  For example, the thorn is “erect” despite the moss that threatens to “drag it to the ground” (20).  Thus, the woman’s grief is persistent and unyielding.  The thorn is also described as “ melancholy” (15) and “forlorn” (9), traits that can be applied to the woman after the loss of her husband and her child.  The thorn is not prickly, but has “knotted joints” (8) – representing the twisted mass of emotions within her.  This is appropriate considering the woman lives with her grief in a “knot” that she cannot untangle.

            The old and grey thorn contrasts with the “beauteous heap” (36) of the colored moss.  The moss is “An infant’s grave in size” (52) and even more “fair” (55).  This statement is ominous even given the possibility that the child is buried under the moss.  The suggestion that the infant’s grave is “fair” could be ascribed to the fact that the infant is “good” – not yet able to be corrupted by the world.  The disparity between the descriptions of moss and the thorn could reflect the how the “good” and the “corrupted” can exist in tandem with one another (such as potentially in the woman who may or may not have killed her child).

             The mystery of whether the woman killed her child is not the focus of “The Thorn.”  Instead, the poem stresses that woman views her child as connected to a specific place.  The line between humanity and the physical world in which we exist blur in this instance.  It is as if, to Wordsworth, the physical world is of equal importance to the unseen elements – such as the soul.  Therefore, to Wordsworth observing nature can be a revelatory experience.

The Harmony of Innocence and Experience

In both class discussion and in the many of the blog posts, I have seen a focus on the contrast and disharmony between the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. There is no denying that they, and what they embody, are "contrary states of the human soul" as Blake says. However, I feel as though there is an underlying harmony between the two, that while they might be contrary they are not disharmonious, but rather components of the entirety of what it means to be human.

What I mean more precisely is that Innocence and Experience do not exist independent of one another, as is evident in several of Blake's poems. The best example of this I could find is in "The Ecchoing Green" when the old folk say "Such, such were the joys. / When we all, girls & boys, / In our youth-time were seen, / On the Ecchoing Green." The old folk, who have lost much if not all of their innocence to the experiences of time, look on in enjoyment of the innocence in youth. They know that in time those children will take their place watching children and grandchildren of their own play without care, and the cycle will continue. The experienced watch over the innocent, protect their innocence in some cases, and take it away in others.

The idea of the green housing youth crosses over between Blake's poems, appearing in both versions of "Nurse's Song" again as a place where children are playing. However, it also appears in "The Garden of Love" where the speaker "used to play" but where there is now a Chapel and a graveyard. This is exactly the interdependence I am talking about, Innocence and Experience rely on each other for significance. The construction of the Chapel and the graveyard has an effect on the speaker because it destroys a symbol of the innocence of the speaker's childhood. The gaining of experience often results in a loss of innocence, but also fosters an appreciation for innocence that only losing it can. To a child who has only ever known innocence it is nothing special, while an adult seeking to enjoy the faded memories of innocence understands its fragility and value.

Blake demonstrates fully the distinction between innocence and experience, yet he also reveals that they are inherently related. Even as innocence is lost, new innocence is born into the world with new life. And while they may be contrary states of the human soul, it is the combination of both and the journey from one to another that defines the human life.

What is Good? What is Bad?

To be honest I wasn’t that fond of Blake’s writing until I read “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” This piece was tastefully audacious and rebellious in numerous ways. Blake uses the Devil as a speaker which naturally makes the reader question the reliability of this narrator (it did for me at least.) When I read “The Voice of the Devil” I thought Blake was going to write about truly evils things and claim (as the Devil) that they were good. But when I was reading this section I found the speaker to be incredibly reasonable. This made me ask myself two questions:

1.    What kind of a person am I to think that the Devil sounds more like the voice of reason rather than the voice of...well, evil?

2.     How have society and religion shaped my perspective on what is good and what is bad?

 The fact that I asked myself these questions shows that Blake achieved what he was hoping to with this piece. The entirety of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” forces the reader to question their notions of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad.’

As I continued to read “The Voice of the Devil” I started to trust the speaker and his claims. But when I read the last line, “3. Energy is Eternal Delight” I quickly changed my mind and again questioned the narrator. I felt like I was tricked into thinking the Devil could be a reliable and trustworthy speaker. I was surprised I felt tricked by this line and I again questioned myself and asked why I was. I think what caused my suspicion was the use of the phrase “Eternal Delight.” I easily pictured the Devil saying this with a very experienced smile that was very far from reliable. Although, I believe the only reason I read it this way is because I have been practically programmed to think that the word “delight” in any religious text is synonymous to sin- which only further proves Blake’s success in this piece. Blake constantly plays with society’s accepted notions of good and evil and persuades the reader that good and bad are equally needed to live a fulfilling life.

Another rebellious technique in this piece was Blake’s use of structure. Some of the pieces within this work look and sound like a conventional poem because there are line breaks, alliterations, repetition, etc. But there are other pieces that look entirely like prose which made identifying this piece very hard. Manipulating structures like this was very radical and also very interesting. Almost every aspect of this piece pushes the reader to question the way they have accepted the world and the things in it.