Also on “We Are Seven”

The form of “We are Seven” reflects the back and forth nature of the two opposing ideas of the young girl and the speaker. The first sixteen stanzas have four lines and an abab rhyme scheme that reflects the back-and-forth of their different understandings of death. The poem relies on this dynamic as its tension comes from the opposition. The two ideas on death remain at odds even and especially at the end of the poem. In fact, while the speaker appears to have complete confidence of his assertion that “If two are in the church-yard laid,/Then ye are only five” (35-6), he does no more than repeat the same sentiment in an attempt to persuade her. In contrast, the girl’s responses are explanatory and detailed—she goes “Twelve steps” (39) to see their graves, she says she knits and sings and eats there. They are a part of her world, and therefore alive to her in a way—or at least a part of her existence. To the speaker, however, that “they are dead” (65) means there can be no further explanation or understanding of her two buried siblings.

While the two ideas are at odds throughout the poem, the discord is perhaps most apparent at the end. The girl repeats the number seven throughout, but she reveals her siblings in pairs, which leaves her as the odd one out. The evens and odds of the poem reflect the back-and-forth, again, of the argument that does not get settled, and the last stanza—the seventeenth, another oddity—even has an extra line. This abccb rhyme scheme in the final stanza stretches out the end. The rhyme between “still” (67) and “will” (68) reflects the stillness and solidity of the girl’s assertion, and the only word in the poem to not have a rhyme in its stanza is “dead” (65). This is perhaps appropriate as it coincides with the speaker’s exclusion of those who are dead from any kind of living consideration or integration with that which is alive. In contrast, though she knows they have died, the girl still sees these two siblings as having gone “away” (50). Heaven to her is just another place—like Conway or the sea—while heaven to the speaker is perhaps nonexistent, or at least so inconceivable that it can’t be spoken about by the living.

The speaker’s suggestion that he is “throwing words away” (67) in the final stanza almost questions the value of the poem in its entirety—the disagreement is never resolved, so what is the point? Not only does the speaker not convince the girl of anything, the girl apparently doesn’t change his views either, and the end of the poem is unsettling in its form and content. That the title of the poem is the girl’s assertion is also interesting—does it give some validity to the idea that the speaker doesn’t allow the girl in the poem? Of course, perhaps there is a kind of resolution set up in the first stanza—“A simple Child” (1) may not “know of death” (4) now, but someday will be old as the speaker (unless she dies young—what then?). The implication of the first stanza is that youth is innocence, that the speaker knows more than the child because he is older. It is then interesting that the topic of the poem is the death of children—doesn’t a girl who has lived to see two siblings die have more experience than someone who hasn’t faced death? Yet she retains her innocence, at least in the eyes of the speaker, by virtue of her youth. It is not that she hasn’t been faced with death, but that she cannot see it, even when it is in front of her, because she is young. The contrasting (assumed) age of the speaker sets up his side as truth for the reader before the girl has begun, as it is represented as the eventual understanding that any child will have with age. (The mention of the children who die in the poem does seem to complicate this assumption, though.)