She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways

To start with, the poem’s title suggests that the writer is missing someone. It raises curiosity about the identify of the girl mentioned in the title. Considering the world used in the title the poem may have been written not in the XX century. What arouses in the title? For what concerns me it provokes a sense of nostalgia, distance and echo, given by the lenght of the vocals.

The poem consists of three quatrains, an alternate rhyme and a slow rhythm. In the first stanza the girl/woman mentioned in the title got introduced. At the end of the stanza we understand this girl is a special girl, because a very few loved her and this is why the poet is interested in her. The second stanza make us understand a lot more: she got called “violet”. Why a violet? Because maybe the violet is a unique and rare flower. Reading the last three lines of the stanza the we can see that the poem is describing her as something more special and original than all the other things in nature: he even compares her to a star! “Half hidden from the eye” makes the girl different from the other ones: she doesn’t want to be in the centre so she arouses a sense of curiosity in the poet. But all this enthusiasm got brutally cut in the last stanza: Lucy is dead and this affected in particular the poet, who obviously fell in love with her where she was alive! This last stanza make the reader’s know why the poet used the past simple in the title.

This is an emotional poem, maybe a way the poet was trying to use to get out of from the depressing situation he was living. Moreover, the poet wants to make us know that not-egocentric people will be always the most curios ones, because someone who is always trying to show who he/she is and what he can do he will never make the people curios to know her!