A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal | Summary & Analysis
- Melchior Antoine
- Apr 13
- 10 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1798) is one of the more popular and accomplished poems by William Wordsworth. The poem is part of a wider collection of poems known as the “Lucy Poems.”
The Lucy poems are a series of five poems written in memoriam to Lucy, Wordsworth's apparent love interest who died suddenly at a young age. They were published between 1800 and 1807. The poems are as follows:
"Strange fits of passion have I known" (1800),
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways" (1800),
"I travelled among unknown men"(1807),
"Three years she grew in sun and shower" (1800),
"A slumber did my spirit seal" (1800).
“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” is the most impressive of the poems. The poem is a contemplation of the impersonal oblivion of nature regarding human cares and love. In this article, I discuss how “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” stands out from the other Lucy Poems, while at the same time being related to them to form a complete cycle.
In addition, I compare it to a poem that in my estimation has a similar theme — Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923).
Full text of the poem
Here is the full text of "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal":
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The poem was written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and was eventually published in 1800 in Lyrical Ballads, a collection of Wordsworth's poetry. It's part of poem series known as the "Lucy poems." However, Lucy's name is not mentioned here. It is implicitly assumed the poem is about her and her dying.
A rhetorical analysis of "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"
The poem is brief yet powerful. Its rhetorical force lies in its ability to say something quite profound in a quiet way. The poem is written in a verse form known as ballad verse, which was a favorite of Wordworth. This means it has a rhyming scheme of ABAB for both of the stanzas.
The poet makes good use of poetic sound effects. For example, in the very first line we have consonance based on sibilance. The repetition of the "s" sounds has a pleasant and sonorous effect. The sibilance is combined with assonance as well.
The "i" sound in "did" "spirit" and "seal" are examples of assonance. This assonance is continued with the same sounds in Line 3 with words like "seem", "thing", and "feel." These poetic sound effects can also be found in Stanza 2. This can be seen especially in Line 7's "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course."
The line is an excellent example of onomatopoeia. Rolled round is as exactly as it sounds and says. It recreates the effect or concept of the Earth rotating on its axis, resulting in the progression of nights and days for humanity.
There are also other rhetorical devices that are used in these two short stanzas. The two stanzas are a good example of juxtaposition. Wordworth uses juxtaposition to contrast the calm and quiet confidence he feels while he watches and observes a youthful Lucy in the first stanza with the quiet shock that he experiences in the second stanza.
In particular, the second stanza relies heavily on negation. Everything confirmed or affirmed in the first stanza is negated in the second. The stanza begins with the word "no" and repeats it in the first line of the first stanza. This is also an example of anaphora or repetition at the beginning of successive phrases. It's pretty effective and slightly chilling in conveying the sense of Lucy now being a lifeless thing that is now part of nature.
Comparison "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" with the other Lucy Poems
The Lucy who features in the Lucy Poems is likely a fictional character. She is used as a sort of muse and personification of many of the Romantic ideals of Wordsworth regarding nature. The poems can all stand alone as complete poems.
However, when considered as a cycle, they support and reinforce each other's message. Let’s take a look at the poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” in full:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees!
The poem is written in regular rhyme and meter. It is made up of two stanzas, each of four lines. The rhyming scheme is ABAB for each of the two stanzas. The first and third lines of each stanza are written in iambic tetrameter, that is four stressed beats.
The second and fourth lines are written in iambic trimeter. This form of alternating rhyme scheme is typically referred to as common meter or ballad meter. It uses inversion or anastrophe, in the first line of both stanzas.
This is where sentences or phrases are written in an unconventional order to either make limes rhyme or impart a certain archaic rhythm to lines.
For example, “A slumber did my spirit seal” without anastrophe would be “My spirit sealed a slumber.” However, that would have interfered with the poem’s rhyming scheme.
The poem is written to express the quiet shock at Lucy’s death, which gives way to a kind of subdued awe and resignation that Lucy is now part of nature and no longer a living thing.
The poet in the first stanza expresses his sureness and security in the peace and safety that Lucy enjoyed while living. The peace is referred to as a slumber. The sibilance, that is the repetition of the “s” sounds in the first line of the poem reinforces the sense of peace and calm expressed here.
The “human fears” that the author refers to here are things such as misfortune, ill health, and death. Lucy in her youth, health, and happiness seemed far removed from these ugly things. She seemed a creature that could not age or beyond “The touch of earthy years” (Line 4).
The shock of Lucy’s death is so sudden and unreal to the poet that he does not even mention it. There seems to even be a missing stanza between the first and second. We are not told how Lucy died. We are just told in the first line of the second stanza “No motion has she now, no force.” There is something that resembles a resolution in the last two lines:
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The poet resigns himself to the fact that Lucy is now part of nature as much as stones or trees. This does not bring him some kind of happy relief. Instead, it brings him to the edge of a new realization of the power of nature to render human hopes and happiness into impersonal oblivion.
The other Lucy poems lack the sublimation expressed in the last lines of this poem. Nonetheless, they prepare us for the eventual fate of Lucy. For example, “Strange Fits of Passion” refers to a period when Lucy was still alive.
The poet recalls visiting her cottage under moonlight on horseback and dreaming of the horror of her passing away before arriving at the cot:
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”
The poet in “Strange Fits of Passion” focuses on painting vivid moonlit scenery as he travels to visit Lucy’s cot somewhere in the wilderness. The moon seems to loom as a kind of augur that gets more and more sinister as he draws near the cottage.
He describes climbing the hill to Lucy’s cot and “The sinking moon . . . came near, and nearer still” (Lines 15-16). Looking back after Lucy's death, this could be interpreted as a warning of Lucy's early and tragic demise. In “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Lucy is portrayed as a hidden gem of nature.
A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
—Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.
This poem is somewhat reminiscent of Wordsworth's daffodil poem — I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, where a wondrous view of a wide field of daffodils for years after brought him pleasure and inner peace. One gets the impression in the poem that the daffodils have been personified into Lucy.
In “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” the poet links Lucy to England. His cherished memories of home while traveling abroad are made all the more fond by connecting them to the “last green field / That Lucy’s eyes surveyed” (Line 16) before she died.
“Three Years She Grew In Sun and Shower” portrays Lucy as chosen by nature to be some sort of bride. In the meantime, nature endows her with the power to understand and commune spiritually with the natural world for a time before being sent back to nature.
The poem is more or less explaining everything. Lucy's spirit was too refined to be of the earth's and so she was chosen to be nature's bride for eternity and given a limited time to enjoy life on earth before being joined with nature in death.
“The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.”
Just as in “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” Lucy is personified as a reflection of nature. The poem is written after the fact of Lucy’s death. There is something idealistic, fanciful, and romantic about the poem.
"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" can be seen as the full explanation of the entire cycle of poems. It sheds a revealing light on the last stanza of "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" quite well. Lucy is now caught in "earth's diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees" as she was from the very start chosen by nature to be its bride.
However, the tone of that poem stands in stark contrast to “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” is absolute proof that Lucy was a fictional person. It is way too fanciful and artificially poetic, with “Nature” giving a whole monologue throughout the poem.
In “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” the poet registers the genuine shock of losing a loved one suddenly. More than that, his contemplation of his loved one being lost to the emotionless and impersonal oblivion of nature is a rare realized moment of understanding the mystical connection between life, nature, and death.
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Comparison with “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) by Robert Frost on the surface does not bear much similarity with Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” However, a closer reading of the two poems reveals a theme in common.
Both poems have the poets standing in awe at the power of nature to render human endeavor and care into oblivion. In the case of Robert Frost, this oblivion is portrayed as beautiful and alluring, whereas in the case of Wordsworth, it is portrayed as a kind of mystical realization where the nexus between life, nature, and death is revealed.
Here is the poem by Frost in full:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep
The poem is rather simple and even whimsical. It tells the story of a man who stops to enjoy the scene of “woods fill up with snow” (Line 4). The poem is written in regular rhyme and meter, with a rhyming scheme of AABA BBCB CCDC CCCC.
The poem’s regular tetrameter and rhyme give it a sing-song quality. This reinforces both the happiness that the poet gets from watching the “lovely, dark and deep” woods and his whimsical urgings expressed in the last stanza. This last stanza of the poem gives us cause to pause.
The poet had “promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep” (Lines 13-14). This implies that the poet is seriously contemplating entering the deep and lovely woods and never coming back. He is thinking of lying down in the woods and allowing himself to be buried under the snow and become one with the lovely scenery that he is admiring.
This is an example of a man who is allured by the freedom that nature presents. Nature is after all a cycle of birth and death. The wintry episode that the poet is witnessing belongs to the death cycle. This cycle of nature presumably can release him of his “promises” in the human world. For a brief moment, he contemplates taking this opportunity to be released.
This is in deep contrast to Wordsworth’s poem. Wordsworth’s poem is much more detached. He is contemplating the power of nature to sublimate human affairs into oblivion, accepts it, comes to terms with it, and stands in silent awe of it. There is nothing detached about Frost’s poem.
While both authors stand in awe at the power of nature to render humans insignificant and into nothingness, Frost’s poem shows a man who is positively delighted and for a brief moment wholly seduced by it.
Juxtaposition in the two poems
Both poems make use of juxtaposition. In the case of Wordsworth, juxtaposition is used to contrast the peace and quiet confidence of believing that Lucy will remain forever safe and young with the cold shock and reality of her death.
On the other hand, Frost uses juxtaposition to compare "the promises to keep" in the civilized lands of the living with the welcoming and cold embrace of freeing nature. The woods stand at the edge of civilization. They are symbolic of the wild, dangerous, and freeing aspect of nature.
The promises to keep are representative of all the obligations that humans have in society. This is in relation to their jobs, their families, their contracts, and so on. This is even dramatized by Frost to a certain extent. For example, his horse is described as being confused as to why he has stopped:
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The horse is a domesticated animal, and doesn't belong to the world of wilderness that the woods represent. It is portrayed as a beacon from the world of the living and civilized, calling the poet back to his "promises to keep." In short, both poems juxtapose human nature against wild nature. However, in the case of Wordsworth, this wild nature is seen as cold, dehumanizing, and impersonal. Frost, on the other hand, portrays it as freeing and seductive.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, January 22). A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal | Summary & Analysis. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/a-slumber-did-my-spirit-seal |
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