The narrator in the poem describes a conversation he has with a small girl. He asks her how many children are in her family and she replies "'Seven are we,/ And two of us at Conway dwell,/ And two of us are gone to sea./ 'Two of us in the church-yard lie'" while she lives with her mother in a cottage near the church yard. The speaker tries to correct the little girl's belief that there are seven children in her family by pointing out that if two of her siblings are dead then they are actually only five. The speaker makes much of the child's inability to realize that since two siblings are dead that they are gone and don't count.
I don't agree with Wordsworth that this shows how children are ignorant of death. In the poem I see that the little girl does know about death, intimately even since she has had two people close to her die. It's not that she doesn't understand death but that perhaps due to her innocence she refuses to equate death with non-existence. Just because she can't see them anymore doesn't necessarily mean they are no longer part of her family. She chooses to spend her time in the graveyard singing to the graves of her sister and brother and to share her meal time with them. In this way she is continuing her connection with them. The narrator's comment that trying to explain that her siblings are dead "'Twas throwing words away" only serves to show that the narrator is blind to anything beyond the rational and not that the girl is stubborn as is implied. Just as she counts those siblings who live at Conway and at the sea as still part of her family so too does she count those unfortunate young ones she can no longer touch. In this case youth sees more clearly than age. This poem seemed to have a unintentional thematic connection to the "Anecdote for Fathers", in that it presents an example of an adult interacting with a child in a way that provides an opportunity for the adult to learn about human nature if the adult is open and observant.
One thing that struck me, or made me wonder about “Anecdote for Fathers” was the repetition of the father holding the son’s arm as he asks his son if he prefers Kilve or Liswyn farm. I couldn’t figure out why the question was so significant or why his son’s response should agitate him so. I’m not even sure why the father is certain that the son is lying, he might have glanced up at the weathervane by coincidence. Besides why would the son lie about which home he prefers? That didn’t make sense to me and seemed to cause a strange note of discordance in the poem.
Amber, your discussion of We are Seven is very much in line with recent critical discussions. Wordsworth's relationship to the text is curious. In 1843 he made the comment noted in the footnote. When the poem was first published, Coleridge provided the first stanza (the one that frames the poem). In both his comment and Coleridge's first stanza, the child is made to be the ignorant one--what can it know of death? The poem itself though clearly suggests that the child's notion is as good a notion as the man who asks her the question. He thinks that family only consists of the living, while she has a more inclusive notion. My sense and most readers' sense is that the child is right--we count the dead. Your comments on Anecdote are also perceptive. That poem clearly sets itself out as a commentary on the lessons that children can teach adults and these two poems together suggest the now nearly impossible to understand revolutionary quality of Wordsworth's poetry--that children, and beggars, and fallen women, and discharged soldiers, simple shepherds, and the dregs of society, might have hearts, souls, and wisdom that are far greater than supposed. (One early reviewer of Lyrical Ballads dismissed the poems because clearly, he said, everyone knows that the feelings of educated and civilized society are of a different order from those of rural people and the uneducated.) In Anecdote the young boy lies so as not to disappoint his father, but note that the idle question asked by the father creates the need to lie--and that the father probably asks the question because he himself is feeling guilty about moving the family and is looking for some way of assuaging that guilt. And you note the gripping of his arm--doesn't that suggest how the entire exchange is necessitated by the father and that the child's response is coerced?
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