“She dwelt” consists of three quatrains, and describes a woman, Lucy, who lived in solitude near the source of the River Dove. In order to convey the dignity and unaffected flowerlike naturalness of his subject, Wordsworth uses simple language, mainly words of one syllable. In the opening quatrain, he describes the isolated and untouched area where Lucy lived, while her innocence is explored in the second, during which her beauty is compared to that of a hidden flower. The final stanza laments Lucy’s early and lonesome death, which only he alone notices.
Throughout the poem, sadness and ecstasy are intertwined, emphasised by the exclamation marks in the second and third verses. The effectiveness of the concluding line in the concluding stanza has divided critics and has variously been described as “a masterstroke of understatement” and overtly sentimental. Wordsworth’s voice remains largely muted, and he was equally silent about the poem and series throughout his life. This fact was often mentioned by 19th century critics, however they disagreed as to its value. A critic, writing in 1851, remarked on the poem’s “deep but subdued and silent devour.”
This is written with an economy and spareness intended to capture the simplicity the poet sees in Lucy. Lucy’s femininity is described in the verse in girlish terms, a fact that has drawn criticism from some critics that see a female icon, in the words of John Woolford “represented in Lucy by condemning her to death while denying her the actual or symbolic fulfillment of maternity”. To evoke the “loveliness of body and spirit”, a pair of complementary but opposite images are employed in the second stanza: a solitary violet, unseen and hidden, and Venus, emblem of love, and the first star of evening, public and visible to all. Wondering which Lucy most resembled—the violet or the star—the critic Cleanth Brooks concluded that although Wordsworth likely viewed her as “the single star, completely dominating [his] world, not arrogantly like the sun, but sweetly and modestly”. Brooks considered the metaphor only vaguely relevant, and a conventional and anomalous complement. For Wordsworth, Lucy’s appeal is closer to the violet and lies in her seclusion, and her perceived affinity with nature.
Wordsworth purchased a copy of Thomas Percy‘s collection of British ballad material “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” in Hamburg a few months before he began to compose the Lucy series. The influence of traditional English folk ballad is evident in the meter, rhythm, and structure of the poem. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways follows the variant ballad stanza a4—b3—a4 b3, and in keeping with ballad tradition seeks to tell its story in a dramatic manner. As the critic Kenneth Ober observed, “To confuse the mode of the ‘Lucy’ poems with that of the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, a story is told as boldly and briefly as possible.” Ober compares the opening lines ofShe Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways to the traditional ballad Katharine Jaffray and notes the similarities in rhythm and structure, as well as in theme and imagery:
There livd a lass in yonder dale,
And doun in yonder glen, O.
And Katherine Jaffray was her name,
Well known by many men, O.
According to the critic Carl Woodring, “She Dwelt” can also be read as an elegy. He views the poem and the Lucy series in general as elegiac “in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death”, and that they have “the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology….if all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy poems are also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_dwelt_among_the_untrodden_ways