Death Through the Eyes of the Sylvan Child

            On Tuesday at 11:00, with 24 hours before I had to hand in my paper, I went dark on social media and, besides time to eat and take a couple of short siestas I spent eight solid hours on my essay. It was pretty much done by 23:00 but I planned on putting on the finishing touches when I was fresh the next day.

            Here’s my paper:

Death Through the Eyes of the Sylvan Child

The child in William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven” is the personification of nature. She is a lens through which to view the human connection with the natural world. The poet uses simple language and nursery rhyme style verse to convey a childlike point of view in order to speak to the child within the adult reader. To help this natural perspective resonate he creates the character of the narrator to oppose it by voicing the general adult understanding of death. The resulting tension operates to shed light on various metaphors that convey through the voice of the child what the poet sees as a natural comprehension of mortality.

The lively verse in iambic tetrameter, the simple language and the alternate rhyme scheme cause the poem to read like a nursery rhyme as can be seen in the example of verse six.

Two of us in the church-yard lie,

My sister and my brother;

And, in the church-yard cottage, I

Dwell near them with my mother.

This uncomplicated presentation provides a means by which an adult reader can grasp what Wordsworth is offering as a child's perspective, but what is really an attempt to give human voice to nature. The poet is using elementary diction to speak to the buried innocence of adult readers about their connection to the natural world.

The narrator’s stance that death brings absence is commonly accepted, while the child’s viewpoint, that death has not diminished her family because she still feels a sense of communion with her siblings, is alien to conventional thinking. Wordsworth has the narrator make a tedious argument that the collective being of a family must be defined by body count, as when he repeats his question as to the number of the child’s siblings as if she has not answered it. This gives gravity to sympathy with the child’s unmeasured attitude towards nature.

             The cottage girl represents simple wisdom about our connectedness with one another through nature. Her young age and rustic lifestyle make her privy to an understanding that one does not need to be near others to feel communion with them, even if they are dead. Wordsworth establishes that the child is of nature before his narrator asks how many siblings she has, with the observation that, “she had a rustic, woodland air, and she was wildly clad". The imagery of her hair as being thick, curled and clustered is also suggestive of untamed thickets of bush. These descriptions align the child with nature and explain her attitude towards her dead siblings before it is voiced. This wild, sylvan child is the anthropomorphization of the natural world. Her response to the argument that being able to run about with living limbs sets her apart from those buried in the churchyard is that her two dead siblings have green graves. The greenness of the grass over their corpses indicates for the child a continuation of life. Further, she points out that the activities she performs in the vicinity of the graves gives continuance to her deceased brother and sister.

The child refers to several activities that she performs at the graves of her family to maintain community with them. These are knitting, hemming, singing, eating and playing. Knitting and hemming are both practical acts of binding. Loops of yarn are bound together in an intricate manner during knitting, and hemming prevents a fabric from unravelling. As the child’s singing to her dead siblings is bound with knitting and hemming by the eleventh verse, this suggests that her singing serves as well to keep the family from unravelling. (Wordsworth 41-44) In verse twelve she relates that she eats her supper at the plot where her young kin are buried and in verse fourteen that she plays there as well. By engaging near the burial sites of her siblings in activities that she shared with them when they were alive, she establishes mutual being with them and gives them continuance, as when vines in a forest grow up to surround, cover and add semblance of life to a dead tree.

In “We Are Seven” Wordsworth indicates a continuum between sibling children, whether distant or near; alive or dead; and also between them and the natural world. The rustic child in the poem does not wonder at death but only at the narrator’s statistical inquiries. Although she knows her age, she does not see time in the same analytical terms as the civilized adult, because time for her is more like time in the natural world. She does not think of the death events of her brother and sister in terms of chronology but rather seasons. Her siblings were and so they are. They were seven and so they can never be five. Like the various organic elements both living and dead in a wild forest, the child’s siblings remain part of her eco-system and cannot be separated from it. The poet presents the narrator as not being able to see the forest for the trees; except in this case the forest is a family and the trees are each child. To see her clan as does the sylvan child, it must be viewed through the eyes of unadulterated human nature, which is in harmony with nature, and which in the end must have its will.