I found the discussion on "Three years she grew" to be really interesting, but one question that continued to nag at me was "why three years?" We circled around the idea to a certain extent, thinking about whether or not it was a parent/child relationship versus two lovers, and we discussed Wordsworth's title choices, and how he transitions from referring to her as "This Child" (4) to "The Girl" (9), to "the Maiden" (23), and finally to "Lucy" (34). This demonstrates her growth over the years, so clearly she was not simply three years old when she died. The more thought I put into it, the more my other thoughts on her age became confused.
Initally, I considered the idea that the speaker of the poem was imagining Nature's ideal future for Lucy. It seemed that Lucy had quite possibly died at the age of three, and the audience was potentially seeing a father figure mourning the death of his daughter. The speaker imagining Nature's thought process in giving Lucy life, and then taking it away after realizing that it had given her too much of the natural world. Wordsworth writes, "This Child I to myself will take" (4), and I took this to mean that Nature saw, after three years on the earth, that Lucy was too beautiful to allow her to keep living in the human world. Instead, Nature saw so much of the natural world in Lucy, that Nature wanted Lucy to be completely one with Nature.
The more I considered this to be a possibility, the more reasonable it seemed. There is no other specific evidence that Lucy grew to be an adult, only what Nature predicts about her future. All of these predictions bring Lucy more into the natural world, and they have no mention of what she will look like or any more human traits and qualities. Ultimately, I think that Wordsworth wrote about a grieving father, trying to reason with himself over the loss of his small child. The father figure imagines why the natural world would take his daughter away so quickly, and his only explanation is that the natural world saw something so beautiful in the child, that it knew the child was meant to have "an overseeing power" (11); the child belonged in nature, sharing her beauty with the natural world.
I think this is right, Sarah: that Lucy grows like any other child for 3 years, and then becomes the special child of Nature for the rest of her life, until she dies (as a young woman?). Interestingly, Shakespeare has a similar conceit in his Sonnet 20, although in that poem the gender-bending nature of Nature is much more explicit.
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