Lucy Gray: Poem by William Wordsworth - Summary

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Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And, when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;

She dwelt on a wide moor,

—The sweetest thing that ever grew

Beside a human door;

You yet may spy the fawn at play,

The hare upon the green;

But the sweet face of Lucy Gray

Will never more he seen.

“To-night will be a stormy night—

You to the town must go;

And take a lantern, Child, to light

Your mother through the snow”.

“That, Father! I will gladly do:

T is scarcely afternoon—

The minster-clock has just struck two,

And yonder is the moon!”

At this the Father raised his hook,

And snapped a faggot-band;

He plied his work;—and Lucy took

The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:

With many a wanton stroke

Her feet disperse the powdery snow,

That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time;

She wandered up and down;

And many a hill did Lucy climb;

But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night Went shouting far and wide;

But there was neither sound nor sight To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood

That overlooked the moor;

And thence they saw the bridge of wood, A furlong from their door.

They wept—and, turning homeward, cried,

“In heaven we all shall meet;”

—When in the snow the mother spied

The print of Lucy’s feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill’s edge

They tracked the footmarks small;

And through the broken hawthorn hedge,

And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:

The marks were still the same;

They tracked them on, nor ever lost;

And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank

Those footmarks, one by one,

Into the middle of the plank:

And further there were none!

—Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

O’er rough and smooth she trips along,

And never looks behind;

And signs a solitary song

That whistles in the wind.

SUMMARY

      In the poem Lucy Gray, Wordsworth says; “It was founded on a circumstance told to me by my sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal and no other vestige of her, backward or forward could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavored to throw over common life with Crabbe’s matter of fact style of handling subjects of the same kind.” It was part of Wordsworth’s aim to deal faithfully with reality without allowing fidelity to pass into the hard literalism of Crabbe.

      Lucy Gray suffers a pathetic doom but her ‘solitude, evoking, as always, the mystic in Wordsworth, touches her with unearthly beauty. When I was little’, a lover of Wordsworth once said, I could hardly bear to read Lucy Gray, it made me feel so lonely’. Wordsworth announces the main impression he wishes to produce in the opening lines:

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child

No mate, no comrade Lucy Knew.

      And rounds off the poem with the same intention:

Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child:

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

O’er rough and smooth she trips along,

And never looks behind:

And sings a solitary song

The whistles in the wind.

      But, as Bradley points out, there is too much reason to fear that for half his readers his ‘solitary child’ is generalized into a mere ‘little girl’.