Lucy Gray

Who is Lucy? I wondered this as I read Wordsworth’s work. The name appears in Strange fits of Passion Have I Known, Song, and again in Three years she grew in sun and shower. In each of these pieces Lucy is presumed dead. In Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known, we are given the story of a man returning home to find his lover:

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

Into a Lover’s head—

“O mercy!” to myself I cried,

“If Lucy should be dead” (364)!

It doesn’t say how long the young man has been gone, we just know he is returning to find his love. It makes me think of someone who has moved away. Whenever you return to your old neighborhood or town to visit, you always wonder if the ones we left behind still remain

. And depending on where you live, we might wonder whether these people are still living. We come to find out that Lucy is, in fact, dead.

Thus nature spake—The work was done—

How soon my Lucy’s race was run!

She died, and left to me

This heath, this calm and quiet scene,

The memory of what has been,

And never more will be (365).

This tells us Lucy is dead and it tells us that she was young when she died, but it does not tell us how she died or why. In Lucy Gray, we finally hear the story of poor Lucy’s demise.

They follow’d from the snowy bank

Those [Lucy’s] footmarks, one by one,

Into the middle of the plank,

And further there were none (367).

Lucy was caught in a snow storm and never seen again. Her family searched for her and found her footsteps ended in the river. The poem goes further to say that she may not really be dead, but still wanders the moor. What if Lucy is not dead? Will her lover return to find her waiting?

In truth there is no way of knowing if these pieces speak of the same Lucy, or if they are even connected.

I like to think they all speak of the same Lucy. And that although they speak of Lucy as being lonely, she had many people who loved her and could possibly still be looking for her. Well, obviously not now, but when she went missing.