The Full Text of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”
1She dwelt among the untrodden ways
2Beside the springs of Dove,
3A Maid whom there were none to praise
4And very few to love:
5A violet by a mossy stone
6Half hidden from the eye!
7—Fair as a star, when only one
8Is shining in the sky.
9She lived unknown, and few could know
10When Lucy ceased to be;
11But she is in her grave, and, oh,
12The difference to me!
The Full Text of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”
1She dwelt among the untrodden ways
2Beside the springs of Dove,
3A Maid whom there were none to praise
4And very few to love:
5A violet by a mossy stone
6Half hidden from the eye!
7—Fair as a star, when only one
8Is shining in the sky.
9She lived unknown, and few could know
10When Lucy ceased to be;
11But she is in her grave, and, oh,
12The difference to me!
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Introduction
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” is a 12-line ballad written in 1798 by William Wordsworth, one of the founding figures of the English Romantic movement. It first appeared in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth jointly published with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the poem, an unidentified speaker mourns the loss of Lucy, a young woman who died young in the English countryside and whose beauty and virtue were overlooked in life. The poem is one of five in a group critics refer to as the “Lucy Poems,” all but one of which mention Lucy by name — though Wordsworth never acknowledged their connection and was notably quiet on who Lucy might have referred to.
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Summary
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She lived in a remote place where few people ever ventured, near the source of the Dove River in central England. She was a young, unmarried woman who didn’t get the appreciation she deserved in life, and whom very few people loved.
She was like a violet next to a big mossy stone, the result of which was that her delicate beauty was often obscured by bigger, more obvious things—it was hard to fully see and understand her. She was as beautiful as a star when it is the only one to appear in the evening sky.
This young woman was unknown by people when she lived, and therefore few people noticed when this woman, whose name was Lucy, died. Nevertheless, she is dead and buried in the earth—and, I must admit, it has had a serious emotional impact on me.
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Themes
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Virtue and Appreciation
In “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” an unidentified speaker mourns Lucy, a beautiful woman who died young and underappreciated in the English countryside. For the speaker, Lucy’s beauty was an aspect of her overall virtue, a quiet, mysterious quality she had in spite of the fact that, as the speaker says, “She lived unknown.” In a world that for the most part couldn’t have cared less about Lucy, the speaker loved her; the speaker insists that she mattered in life, and still matters in death. The poem, then, suggests that virtue like Lucy’s can have a lasting emotional impact even if its audience is thin, and that appreciating it is therefore worthwhile.
The first stanza establishes that Lucy was worthy of love and praise despite her anonymity. The poem’s title and opening line—“She dwelt among the untrodden ways”—set up a context of anonymity and remoteness. Lucy’s “ways,” or the place she lived, were “untrodden,” meaning very few people walked over them. And she “dwelt” there, implying she rarely left her base. As a result, her chances of encountering other people were slim. This is why “there were none to praise” and “very few to love” her.
By noting that no one praised Lucy, the speaker implies she was worthy of praise, and therefore that it’s a shame she didn’t get the recognition she deserved. The question of love is only slightly different: Lucy didn’t go totally unloved, but only “very few” loved her. The speaker, who laments how seriously under-appreciated Lucy was in life, implies that the speaker was one of the few to take due notice of Lucy. In the rest of the poem, the speaker will argue that even though it affected few people, Lucy’s virtue had serious value.
The speaker goes on to show how her virtue persisted despite having no audience. Lucy was like “A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye!” Because of Lucy’s isolation, her beauty and virtue would only reveal themselves under close attention; she was like a subtle flower in the shadow of an obvious rock. Here again, the speaker implies his or her love for Lucy. There was pleasure in attempting to grasp Lucy’s virtue, perhaps because it was essentially ungraspable, or “Half hidden.” Finding it—or nearly finding it—required serious work. Lucy was also as “Fair” as the first star in the evening sky. Like the star (probably an allusion to the goddess Venus, who represents beauty, love, and sex), Lucy is fair, or beautiful, because she is isolated, and therefore unique. She shines when no one else is able to, suggesting a special power. And even as she went unnoticed, she kept “shining.” The speaker, by drawing attention to these aspects of Lucy’s virtue—her modest beauty, her mysteriousness, her consistent shining despite having no audience—claims that her virtue was powerful and good, and ultimately unforgettable.
In stanza 3 the speaker says again how seriously under-appreciated Lucy was in life. Though part lament, the observation serves more to emphasize the speaker’s final affirmation of Lucy’s lasting impact. Lucy “lived unknown.” Here, the speaker deepens the claim from stanza 1. Not only did Lucy go through life unpraised and pretty much unloved—she “lived unknown,” the result of which was that few people noticed her death. By emphasizing this point, the speaker seems to consider a counterargument: maybe, if Lucy was so unknown, her virtue didn’t matter after all.
Quickly, however, the speaker refutes this idea. Lucy made a “difference.” The poem’s final line is an exclamatory, and therefore confident, affirmation of Lucy’s value. And this is at the moment when she’s most isolated: she’s not just “Half hidden,” but “in her grave,” sealed up in the earth. Lucy’s virtue is not ultimately worthless, says the speaker. It was enough to make a difference for him or her, and because of that Lucy's memory—and perhaps, in a way, her virtue itself—survives.
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Love and Mystery
The poem provides few details about the living situation of its subject, a beautiful woman named Lucy who died young in the English countryside, but it makes clear that she lived in isolation. For that reason, not many people knew her, and far fewer loved her. As one of the “few” who did, however, the speaker reflects upon his or her love for Lucy, lingering over her remote, mysterious qualities; for him or her, this mystery was, and still is, the source of Lucy’s loveliness. Love, the poem suggests, is enhanced by this sort of incomplete knowledge of its subject.
In stanza 1, the speaker presents Lucy as a somewhat mysterious figure. Lucy “dwelt among untrodden ways.” Dwell, which basically means to stay in one place, is a vague word. It doesn’t describe how Lucy actually spent her time, but simply proves that she existed and didn’t venture far from home. “[U]ntrodden,” which means unexplored, enhances the vagueness of Lucy’s situation. These words dress Lucy in an aura of mystery. The speaker is obviously captivated by Lucy (otherwise the poem wouldn’t be about her), but doesn’t explain why, at least not in detail.
In stanza 2, the speaker points to Lucy’s mystery as the reason for her loveliness and beauty. She was like “A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye!” By comparing Lucy to a flower, the speaker implies she was beautiful. So, one reason for his or her love was Lucy’s beauty. But the image gets more detailed: Lucy was like a flower that was “Half hidden.” The exclamation mark that ends the line (“from the eye!”) conveys the speaker’s wonder and excitement. There was something hidden about Lucy, a quality that never waned and always deepened the speaker’s infatuation.
Though dead, Lucy’s inherent mystery—something about her the speaker just couldn’t pin down—survives and continues to inspire love. In the poem’s final line, the speaker reiterates through implication the difficulty of expressing this quality. Exactly how she made her impact, the speaker can’t say. All the speaker knows is that Lucy made a “difference,” a word as open to interpretation as Lucy was.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”
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Lines 1-2
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,The poem's first line signals to the reader that this "She," whoever she is, is central to the poem. The speaker doesn't, however, name the main character in these first lines, and in fact won't do so till line 10. The speaker could be withholding this information for a few reasons. For now, though, it's enough to note that the incomplete information infuses the scene with mystery. (For clarity, the rest of this entry will use the name Lucy.)
The language that follows enhances that mystery: Lucy "dwelt," and her "ways" were "untrodden." Each of these words is open to interpretation. "Dwelt" indicates physical activity, and its hard /d/ and /t/ sounds give it a rock-like finality that emphasizes what the reader will soon learn—that is, that Lucy hunkered down and hardly left this place. But the word is also pretty vague, and could refer to any activity, really. How Lucy actually spent her time is still a mystery (and will remain so for the entire poem).
Then comes "untrodden," one of the poem's most important words. Literally, it means "not walked on," trodden being the participle of tread, which means to walk. So this would mean that Lucy's "ways," which refer generally to the place where she lived, were undiscovered territory. This physical definition, however, leads to the more abstract one. If Lucy's home received few visitors, then Lucy received few visitors. And that would mean few people got the chance to know her (sure enough, the speaker will soon confirm this). As such, Lucy herself is "untrodden." Sealed up behind her fair, modest virtue is a character that even the speaker, who loved her and knew her, must still describe as "Half hidden."
As if to reflect that its own character isn't entirely knowable, the first line follows a meter that doesn't exactly fit within the standard form. The line is supposed to follow iambic tetrameter, which would give it eight syllables in total, but it has one extra:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
To fit the meter, its last two syllables, "trodden," would need to be compressed into one, and they nearly are, imitating a fast version of the stepping they describe. This small quirk signals that even though this ballad, with its steady meter and near-perfect rhymes, will sound at many points like a nursery rhyme, it will also have moments of transcending its form.
And in line 2, the speaker proves that there is in fact territory to cover. Lucy lived "Beside the springs of Dove," or near the place in the English countryside (specifically, the Midlands, a rural area south of Manchester) where the Dove River rises from the earth and begins its southward flow. Lucy, in other words, is not a figment of the speaker's imagination; she was a real person who lived in a real place that the speaker can actually point to. This physical position suggests a few things about Lucy's character. First, the word "springs" reminds the reader that even though Lucy is dead (the speaker hasn't stated this yet, but it can be inferred from the use of the past tense), there is an eternal quality to the place she lived; the river keeps flowing.
Her position "Beside" the river is notable as well. Later, Lucy will be described as occupying marginal space (see line 5). In the same way that, in line 1, she is "among" the "ways" of the countryside, she is "Beside" the river, almost a natural part of the landscape who never loudly announced her presence or demanded more space than she needed.
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Lines 3-4
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love: -
Lines 5-6
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye! -
Lines 7-8
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky. -
Lines 9-10
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be; -
Lines 11-12
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Symbols
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The Star
In “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” the star from stanza 2 does a lot of symbolic work, representing basically all the personality traits the speaker uses to describe Lucy. In this sense, overall, the star stands in for obvious but inexpressible beauty.
First, it symbolizes Lucy’s beauty. The speaker describes the star as “Fair,” which in its archaic sense means beautiful. At least in part, the star’s fairness derives from its isolation; it is beautiful because it is the “only one” in the sky. So, the star also points to Lucy’s isolation, reminding the reader of much of stanza 1, in which Lucy is described as living “among untrodden ways”—basically, in an isolated rural location—and having few to praise or love her.
There is also a delicacy in the solely shining star. If it is beautiful for its isolation, then its beauty is fleeting: soon the sky will be crowded with stars. This delicacy, or fragility, recalls the directly previous description of Lucy as a violet next to a mossy stone—a slight, pretty flower thriving in the margin of a big, hairy rock.
Finally, the star points to one of Lucy’s contradictions. In stanza 1 the speaker calls her a “Maid,” which in addition to implying youth and beauty, suggests, in its archaic meaning, that Lucy is a virgin. And later, Lucy is described as "unknown," which also, archaically, meant virginal.
In one sense, the lone star supports this sense of purity, since it is clear, bright, and uncrowded. It is unobscured by other stars or, for example, factory smoke, which was common in English cities at the time the poem was written. As the first star in the sky, however, this one is probably not a star at all, but the planet Venus, named after the Roman goddess for love and beauty—and sex. In this case, the star stands for Lucy’s sex appeal as well. The indirect allusion to Venus, therefore, adds another layer to the speaker’s feelings for Lucy.
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
The poem contains two allusions. The first explicitly alludes to a place, the Dove River in England. The second implicitly refers to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and sex.
The Dove River is a waterway in the English Midlands that rises on Axe Edge Moor and flows 45 miles south before joining the Trent River. It's about 30 miles south of Manchester. Line 2's allusion to Dove grounds the speaker's memory of Lucy in reality.
Grief is a hard thing to express. As such, anything that tries to do so could easily depend on totally abstract language, pure products of the imagination. The poem certainly becomes more metaphorical in the second stanza, but this reference to the Dove River tells the speaker that this imagery comes from a specific location: Lucy's "untrodden ways," or the isolated place where she lived. Ultimately this rooting makes the mournful tone more powerful. The "ways" still exist as a reminder of Lucy.
Also, the Dove's proximity to Manchester, a city that was booming at the turn of 19th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution, subtly contrasts Lucy's isolated haunts from the bustling industry to the north.
The second allusion, to Venus, appears in lines 7 and 8, when the speaker mentions the first star in the sky. It should first be noted that this star isn't necessarily Venus. Venus would only have been the first "star" in the sky if its orbit had been such that it appeared above the horizon from the speaker's point of view at evening. However, Venus is probably the most famous of celestial objects that sometimes appear first in the sky, so it's reasonable to assume that Wordsworth had it in mind. If the star is in fact a reference to Venus, it emphasizes Lucy's beauty and the speaker's love for her, and hints at a subtler dynamic in their relationship.
Venus is the goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and sex (the Roman version of the Greek Aphrodite). Recognizing Venus in the evening sky, the speaker must be overwhelmingly reminded of Lucy, whom the speaker believed was beautiful (she was "Fair" and like a "violet") and whom the speaker loved (the speaker was one of the "few" who did). If the speaker compares Lucy to Venus, the speaker may also have in mind her sexuality. This note connects to a few other moments in the poem. In line 3, the speaker calls Lucy a "Maid," which in one of its archaic senses means virgin. And in line 9, the speaker says Lucy was "unknown." Again, one archaic definition of "to know" is "to have sex with." By comparing Lucy to Venus, the speaker may imply sexual attraction to her. Considering the other moments that hint at Lucy's sexuality, the reader might consider the speaker as not only grief-stricken, but sexually frustrated.
This is, however, just one interpretation. The speaker may just as well mention Lucy's virginity in order to emphasize her isolation.
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Polyptoton
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Parallelism
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Apostrophe
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"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Dwelt
- Untrodden
- Springs
- Dove
- Maid
- Praise
- Violet
- Fair
- Unknown
- Lucy
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“Dwelt” is the slightly outdated version of “dwelled,” which is the past tense of “dwell.” Dwell has two principal meanings. The first is physical: it means to live in a specific place. The second is mental: it means to focus thought for an extended period on one thing. During her life, Lucy dwelled in the physical sense in the “untrodden” English countryside. In the mental sense, the poem’s speaker dwells on the subject of Lucy.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”
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Form
“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” is a ballad, a fairly flexible form. Though ballads are typically longer and narrative, this one is brief and lyrical (indeed, it appeared in a book called Lyrical Ballads). It is divided into three quatrains, or four-line stanzas. It can be said to contain a narrative—Lucy lived, was unknown, and died—but it’s slight, and the title pretty much gives it away (Lucy “dwelt,” but doesn’t dwell). Instead, despite its nursery-rhyme steadiness, the poem is dominated by a mournful tone. In that way, it can also be looked at as an elegy.
Therefore, the poem is both: a ballad that sounds like an elegy. The poem is balladic in terms of both form and content. Formally, its steady rhymes and meter give it a sound that fits its origins. The English ballad is derived from a French form called chanson balladée, which rhymed and was set to dancing and music. It might be hard to imagine anyone clicking heels to this poem, but the reader can certainly imagine it appearing in a book of nursery rhymes, which have a musical quality to them. Content-wise, as mentioned, it has a slight narrative, and it also takes the reader on a short journey through the British countryside.
The poem is elegiac in that it mourns Lucy. It is very clearly about the loss of a loved one. The entire time, Lucy is referred to in the past tense, and the final stanza explicitly mentions her death: “Lucy ceased to be” and “is in her grave.” But the poem isn’t simply elegiac for the fact of mentioning Lucy’s death. It’s elegiac for the tone of the speaker, who regrets not having more fully appreciated Lucy in life, and feels deeply the “difference” wrought by her death.
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Meter
The 12-line poem follows iambic tetrameter (four iambs per line, meaning eight syllables total) in its odd-numbered lines and iambic trimeter (three iambs, six syllables) in its even-numbered lines. This structure—alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter—is pretty typical of English ballads. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was published in the same book as “She Dwelt,” has the same meter.
For most of the lines, the meter is perfect. The iambs (da DUM) are obvious and the poem clops evenly forward. Listen to lines 3-4 as an example:
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:Combined with the rhyme scheme, this steady meter gives the poem the sound of a nursery rhyme. The few breaks from uniformity, however, are worth paying attention to. Take line 7:
—Fair as a star, when only one
Here, the first foot is reversed: it’s a trochee (DA dum) rather than an iamb (da DUM). In a line so short, one odd foot makes all the difference. In this case, it emphasizes “Fair,” which refers to Lucy’s beauty. So, the stressed words/syllables in the line are: Fair, star, on-, and one. The line’s point is as clear as can be: no one is fair like Lucy was (or is, in the speaker’s memory).
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Rhyme Scheme
“She Dwelt among the Uncommon Ways” follows a straightforward rhyme scheme:
ABAB
To be as clear as possible, though, it should be noted that the rhyming sounds change each stanza. Because the poem is short, its scheme can be fully represented here: ABAB CDCD EFEF
This fairly basic scheme gives the poem a nursery-rhyme quality that matches its content, as if Lucy, a “Maid,” lived all alone in a fairytale land. A few alterations, however, stave off the slumber that perfect, regular rhymes might induce in the reader. For example, there is one case of slant rhyme: “stone” does not rhyme perfectly with “one.” Since it comes first, “stone” sets the rhyme. “[O]ne,” therefore, is responsible for breaking it. As the culprit, "one" receives attention; as a word that emphasizes both Lucy’s isolation and her unique beauty, it deserves that attention.
Internal rhyme also emphasizes “one,” which rhymes across the distance with “none” from stanza 1. This connection would seem to highlight the speaker’s role in the poem. While Lucy lived, none praised her. The poem, however, is certainly a form of praise, and the speaker is the one person responsible for it. With it, the speaker seems to be making amends for not having adequately appreciated Lucy in life. Though “one” refers to the star, and therefore Lucy, it recalls one of the poem’s main messages, that so long as there’s one person to appreciate Lucy's beauty and virtue, it will have mattered, and will continue to matter.
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Speaker
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The poem’s speaker is anonymous, genderless, and uses a first-person pronoun only once (“me,” the final word of the poem), but nevertheless conveys strong emotions that tell the reader about his or her character.
One of the first things the reader will notice is that the speaker describes him- or herself indirectly. That is, the speaker describes how other people are in order to show how the speaker is not. For example, there were “very few to love” Lucy. Later, the speaker says that “few could know” when Lucy died. In both cases, the implication is clear: that the speaker counts among the few. So, the reader knows that the speaker loved Lucy.
In some ways, however, the speaker is like everyone else. While Lucy lived, “there were none to praise” her. By using the word “none,” the speaker suggests that even the speaker, too, failed to praise Lucy in her lifetime. The speaker admits a mistake, and a strain of regret enters the poem’s mournful tone. Lucy was also “unknown.” Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean unknown by all, but it prompts the reader to wonder whether the speaker really did know Lucy, in a deep sense. She was, after all, “Half hidden from the eye”—even the few who loved her didn’t fully understand her.
Pretty much every other moment in the poem supports this image of the speaker as someone who loved and deeply cared for Lucy. In stanza 2, the descriptions of the violet and the star show that the speaker paid close enough attention to Lucy in life to be permanently impressed by her beauty. And the speaker’s final exclamation—“oh, / The difference to me!”—reinforces that sense of permanence. Lucy’s loss, says the speaker, is something the speaker will never really get over.
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“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Setting
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The reader might look at the poem as having two settings. One is more obvious: the physical setting of the British countryside—“the untrodden ways”—the place where Lucy lived and died. The second is the place from which the speaker remembers Lucy, which the poem only hints at.
The poem’s title and first line tell the reader that the setting is rural. “[U]ntrodden ways”—literally, pathways that few people have walked on—implies remoteness and a low population. To reinforce this impression, the second line comes in with a reference to a specific place. Lucy lived “Beside the springs of Dove,” which refers to the starting point of the Dove River. The Dove River is located in central England, in a rural, somewhat mountainous region known as the Midlands. So now, the reader can very confidently say that Lucy lived in the country, though should also note that Manchester and Birmingham, two industrial centers, weren’t that far away from the head of the Dove.
The second stanza adds detail to the rural setting. For example, the speaker calls Lucy “A violet by a mossy stone.” Because the area is “untrodden,” it seems, the violet has been spared a death by stomping boots. Lucy is also like a star. From that, the reader can assume the setting is a place where stars can be seen—a place with no or little light pollution.
The speaker, of course, is the one who supplies the images of the star and violet. It’s reasonable to ask from where the speaker is doing so. One might argue that the speaker reflects on Lucy’s death from the place where she lived, and that that’s why the speaker is noticing these images. One could also argue, however, that the speaker is plucking the images from memory. The speaker refers throughout the poem to other people, everyone who didn’t know or appreciate Lucy. The speaker may be mourning Lucy from a crowded place like a city. If so, then the speaker may also be mourning the loss of Lucy's rural surroundings.
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Literary and Historical Context of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”
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Literary Context
Wordsworth wrote “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" in 1798, when he was 28 years old and traveling in Germany with his sister, the poet Dorothy Wordsworth. This was the same year Wordsworth and his good friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, jointly published Lyrical Ballads, though “She Dwelt” first appeared in the second, 1800 edition of the book.
Lyrical Ballads is widely considered to have propelled the English Romantic movement into full flight. Most of its poems were written by Wordsworth; Coleridge contributed four (though to be fair, his most famous, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is pretty long). In Lyrical Ballads, the writers paid tribute to the natural world, describing its effect upon human emotion and sense of self. In his preface to the 1800 edition, Wordsworth describes the poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
1798 was the beginning of Wordsworth’s “great decade,” the term some critics use to refer to what they believe were his years of most valuable productivity. During that same trip to Germany with his sister, Wordsworth would draft the other four poems that appear in the group critics call the “Lucy Poems.” In addition to “She Dwelt,” they are “Strange Fits of Passion I have Known,” “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” “Three Years She Grew,” and “A Slumber Did my Spirit Steal,” all but the last of which mention Lucy by name. Some have proposed that Lucy represented Dorothy, others Wordsworth's muse (or generalized source of inspiration), and others Peggy Hutchinson, a childhood friend who died young and whose sister, Mary, Wordsworth eventually married. Wordsworth, however, never acknowledged the link between the poems, and when asked who Lucy might represent, kept quiet.
1798 was also the publication year of the novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, the unfinished and posthumously published sequel to feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft had been married to the anarchist and writer William Godwin, and died eleven days after giving birth to their child, Mary, the future author of Frankenstein and wife to Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Historical Context
For Wordsworth in 1798, the most important event in recent history was probably the French Revolution, whose disorder, for the following decade, spread through Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in a series of military conflicts. It was during this time that a French general named Napoleon Bonaparte made a name for himself during campaigns in Italy and Egypt. The king of England, King George III, sat warily on his throne, knowing that as France’s military spread across the continent, so did the populist sentiment that had activated the revolution. In fact, in 1800—the same year “She Dwelt” was first published—the king survived two assassination attempts. Also in this year, England absorbed Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through the Acts of Union 1800.
Wordsworth, a young man during the French Revolution and its aftermath, built much of his political thinking on what he’d learned from the French revolutionaries, whom he greatly admired. He was appalled by the Reign of Terror, however, and as he grew older and more conservative ended up rejecting much of his youthful idealism.
In English cities, the Industrial Revolution made the turn of the century was a time of major industrial and social development. Factories rose, darkening the skies and polluting the rivers, and workers got organized enough to start demanding more political and labor rights. Wordsworth would write many poems about city life in the coming years ("The world is too much with us," "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"), but in Lyrical Ballads he limited himself almost entirely to nature. “She Dwelt” contains no explicit mention of city life or industry, though Lucy’s home, near the origin of the Dove River, wasn’t too far from Manchester, a cotton-producing city transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
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More “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” Resources
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External Resources
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Preface to Lyrical Ballads — The LitChart guide for the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth develops one of the guiding poetical theories of the English Romantic movement.
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Personal Essay about "She Dwelt" by a U.S. Novelist — A short personal essay about the poem by novelist Sabina Murray.
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1839 Transcription of “She Dwelt” — A version of the poem transcribed by Wordsworth in 1839 for one “Lady Dell.”
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Sir Andrew Motion Reads "She Dwelt" — Contemporary English knight and poet Andrew Motion reads the poem and shares a personal anecdote about it.
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William Wordsworth's Biography — A biography from the Poetry Foundation detailing Wordsworth’s career, personal relationships, political thinking, and poetical theories.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth
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