“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” by William Wordsworth

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How many lines does a poet need to write in order to record a loved one’s death? Of course, the story of a person’s death, as with their life, goes further than any number of words can express. British Romantic poet William Wordsworth nonetheless captures the gravity of a young woman’s death in eight lines in his poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” which juxtaposes the moment before and the moment after his lover’s death. Her death itself happens between the lines.

By giving such a pivotal moment no more than blank space in the stanza break, Wordsworth shows how the things we leave unsaid are as — if not more –important than what we say:

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.

Attentive to personal experience and natural fact, the poet says only what he knows, which turns out to be very little indeed. For what is there to know beyond the way he saw his lover as an ageless dream? What can the poet observe, after she’s died, except that her body stops moving and resembles stones and trees more than they do the person they once were? Any words devoted to the actual death are either scientific hypothesis or religious belief.

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Still, we feel the unstated weight — the heaviness of her death. Words would only reduce the massive, ungraspable end of life to cheap words. The power of the verse lies in what he does not say. He talks around death, brings it near, makes it present before us, but doesn’t do us the harm of making it too obvious.

Also hidden are any direct reference to the poet’s feelings. He allows us to imagine for ourselves the weight of his grief in the way he joins these two incongruous stanzas together, making us draw the connection between them. Line by line, Wordsworth shows us what he sees. He explains in only a few words what it’s like to watch a person become a body. The enlivening spirit slips away into the callous, inexpressive language of science: “motion,” “force,” “diurnal course.” Time, like the earth, keeps moving after the beloved is gone.

The poem succeeds most gracefully by recasting this bare human experience in indirect language, harmless imagery, elegant rhythm, simple rhyme — all the elements of his beautiful little song. Art and beauty soothe even as they instruct, and Wordsworth gives us the words to say what we mean without having to say it in more painful terms that we can bear. That is a gift for anyone trying to comprehend the end of life.