William Wordsworth And Samuel Coleridge's We Are Seven

For many years, the well know collection of stories, Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems were romantically mysterious as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published them anonymously in 1798; it was a joint collection of poems that sold steadily and earned positive reviews. Among the poems included in this work is We are seven, which illustrates a young girl’s security in counting her two deceased siblings as part of her family. Through her dialogue with the narrator, the overarching themes of this poem are death and the unbreakable familial bonds, they are portrayed, and in a sense parallel to the life of Wordsworth himself. The girl in the poem is eight years old and Wordsworth lost his mother when he was only eight; the girl also had two siblings pass away – two of Wordsworth’s children passed away. These similarities …show more content…
The first being the repetition of the phrase “we are seven”, which is in fact repeated seven times throughout the poem. The narrator continues to challenge her, but she keeps repeating this idea in slightly different terms. This repetition is a sign of the girl’s strength, tenacity, and obligation both to her family and to her over-all life philosophy: the dead never truly leave us; it is commanding and effective. The second form of symbolism is the way in which Wordsworth demonstrates the passing of time. He casually mentions differences in seasons. The changing of seasons acts as an elusive reminder that death has not been a one-time event in the girl’s life. She has coped with the reality of death for several seasons. As previously mentioned, the girl speaks about her sibling’s graves being green, she also mentions that after Jane’s death, she and brother John would play at her grave when “the grass was dry”, signifying summer, and finally when John dies “the grass was white with snow”. The progression through time is subtle, but it affirms her broad experiences with