Greta Thyssen

            On Friday I started working on my first short assignment for Romantic Literature on the subject of the way that William Wordsworth deals with childhood in one poem. I picked "We Are Seven" in which the narrator encounters a poor little country girl who insists that her and her siblings total seven in number even though two of them are dead. Here’s what I have so far:

In “We Are Seven" the lively meter, the simple language and the style of rhyming every other line causes the poem to read like a nursery rhyme, written in a manner that a child could understand. This lightens the impact of the poem’s theme of the death of children and keeps the poem from being dragged down into the sense of loss that the speaker is advertising. The narrator insists upon the reality of death and the absence that results when a loved one dies but the child still feels the presence of and a sense of communion with her lost siblings and seems to have no feeling that the size of her family has diminished. She visits her brother and sister’s graves, sings to them and does not accept that they are gone. The narrator is confused and will accept only life as he understands it and attempts to put a crack in the little girl’s joy. He rejects her conclusion that all of her siblings are still together and that there is no distinction between living in one’s mother's house, being away at sea and being in a grave.

By using childlike language Wordsworth conveys a child’s understanding of death.

            Death and children is a common theme in William Wordsworth’s poems of Lyrical Ballads and he seems fatalistic about the promise of childhood, perhaps because of his own daughter's death at the same age as that of the little girl in “We Are Seven”.

            I read several of the Wordsworth poems out loud. His earlier poems seem more creative and clever than his later ones.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. So far all of the stories involve someone hiring Mason for something else and then later someone is killed and so he defends them for murder. In this case a woman named Sybil hires Mason to use her money to buy stock in a land development that her husband Bruce has invested in. He was persuaded to put up the money by his lover, Roxy because she thinks there is oil on one of their properties where she has a house. In this company shareholders must be unanimous about any land development and so if Mason buys stock then he'll be able to block any oil enterprise, which will cause Roxy to lose interest in Bruce so he’ll come back to Sybil. One of the shareholders, George Lutts, finds out that Sybil is financing Mason’s investment. He goes to confront her on the hill above Roxy’s home where she is spying on her and he is shot. Sybil runs and catches a cab to Mason’s office. It is determined that Sybil’s gun killed Lutts and so she is arrested for murder.

Mason employs lots of clever little tricks in every story, such as in this case when he uses a cart with very squeaky wheels to bring evidence into the courtroom. The whole point seemed to be just to throw Burger, the prosecutor off his guard. Mason figures out that it was actually Lutts’s son in law that killed him.

Sybil was played by Margaret Hayes, who appeared in several movies, including the Blackboard Jungle. She was also a fashion model, a fashion designer, a boutique owner, a radio talk show host and a fashion editor for Life Magazine.

            Roxy was played by Greta Thyssen, who died in January of this year at the age of 90. She is said to have been Miss Denmark of 1952 but she's not on the official list of winners. When she moved to Hollywood she got mostly sexy bad girl blonde roles. She appeared in three Three Stooges films and was also a game show model.