Considering the layout and the title of the poem the intelligent reader may make some conjectures about the possible meaning of the text.  The poem seems to suggest a topic connected to love and the reader may expect the poem to be about something happen in love.

The layout makes the structure of the poem immediately visible: it is arranges into  three stanzas of four lines each.. The space between the stanzas highlights the three divisions of the explanations given by the writer. The poem celebrates an admired girl or young woman by associating her with the beauties of nature. Right from line one, the speaker introduces “She,” his subject of affection. Only much later in the work, however, do we discover that this “She” has a specific name: “Lucy”. The title line implies Lucy lived unknown and remote, both physically and intellectually. The poet's subject's isolated sensitivity expresses a characteristic aspect of Romantic expectations of the human, and especially of the poet's, condition.

"She dwelt" consists of three quatrains, and describes Lucy who lives in solitude near the source of the River Dove. In order to convey the dignity and unaffected flowerlike naturalness of his subject, Wordsworth uses simple language, mainly words of one syllable. In the opening quatrain, he describes the isolated and untouched area where Lucy lived, while her innocence is explored in the second, during which her beauty is compared to that of a hidden flower. The final stanza laments Lucy's early and lonesome death, which only he notices. This is written with an economy and spareness intended to capture the simplicity the poet sees in Lucy. Lucy's femininity is described in the verse in girlish terms. To evoke the "loveliness of body and spirit", a pair of complementary but opposite images are employed in the second stanza: a solitary violet, unseen and hidden, and Venus, emblem of love, and the first star of evening, public and visible to all

Throughout the poem, sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses.

The fact that the woman dwelled among “untrodden” ways is significant. Wherever it was that she “dwelt” in the countryside, it was in a place (or places) not frequently visited. Notice, then, what this fact implies about the speaker: he, somehow, has visited her dwelling place; he, somehow, has had the chance to know and appreciate her, and now he shares that privilege with the reader.

The short elegiac poem in nature goes through graceful description and mourning in three stanzas. Lucy's unnoticed beauty and importance to the speaker is felt throughout the poem. As the poem is an elegy, its obvious theme is death.

Lucy's "untrodden ways" symbolically stands for her physical isolation and the unknown details of her mind and life. In the poem, the poet is more focused on his experience when reflecting on her death than on the observation of Lucy. The poem is written with an economy of words so as to apprehend the simplicity of Lucy as described by the poet. Though it is short, simple, and has a use of everyday words, it is able to make a great and meaningful poetry with a passionate feeling of love and the grief of the poet.

He tells us nothing practical, nothing factual about her at all. Even the 'springs of Dove' that she dwelled beside are not a real place. All he tells us about Lucy in this poem is that she lived unknown, and that she is now dead.