Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a
thing that could not feel
The touch of
earthly years.
No motion has
she now, no force;
She neither
hears nor sees;
Rolled round
in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Commentary
In the first
stanza, we learn that the speaker was, as it were, asleep to the
reality of human mortality. Like a youth who is unaware of death or
discounts it, he “had no human fears.” His beloved seemed to be
immortal. For many young people, death is not much of a concern.
Invulnerable and immortal, many young people believe that death
happens only to other people-and, usually, to older other people.
Apparently, the speaker of the poem shares these same illusions. For
him, as he tells us, his Lucy “seemed a thing that could not feel/
The touch of earthly years.”
When his
immature attitude toward death and his unrealistic notions about the
immortality of his beloved are shattered by her untimely demise, the
speaker is clearly appalled by the inescapable fact that his beloved
Lucy, once a vibrant and lovely young woman, has been reduced to a
mere object. Horribly, she has become a mere thing among things,
motionless, lifeless, deaf, and blind, like all the other inanimate
objects that are “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”:
No motion has
she now, no force;
She neither
hears nor sees;
Rolled round
in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks,
and stones, and trees.
For anyone, the
death of a loved one is terrible. It is perhaps more horrible still
for a young man who has believed that death happens only to others
and could never touch his beautiful young Lucy. The comparison, in
the second stanza of the poem, of the inanimate Lucy to “rocks, and
stones, and trees” reinforces the speaker’s sense of shock and
horror, echoing the numbing grief that he obviously feels. In having
been so rudely awakened, as it were, from the “slumber” that once
“sealed” his spirit, he has suffered the death of an illusion. He
may be wiser, but he is also sadder. The final lines of the poem
suggest, perhaps, the numbness that he now feels-a numbness that is
akin to the insensate condition of the deceased Lucy. He, too, has
become something of an insensate thing, akin to “rocks, and stones,
and trees.”
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