The Full Text of “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower”
1Three years she grew in sun and shower,
2Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
3On earth was never sown;
4This Child I to myself will take;
5She shall be mine, and I will make
6A Lady of my own.
7"Myself will to my darling be
8Both law and impulse: and with me
9The Girl, in rock and plain,
10In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
11Shall feel an overseeing power
12To kindle or restrain.
13"She shall be sportive as the fawn
14That wild with glee across the lawn
15Or up the mountain springs;
16And hers shall be the breathing balm,
17And hers the silence and the calm
18Of mute insensate things.
19"The floating clouds their state shall lend
20To her; for her the willow bend;
21Nor shall she fail to see
22Even in the motions of the Storm
23Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
24By silent sympathy.
25"The stars of midnight shall be dear
26To her; and she shall lean her ear
27In many a secret place
28Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
29And beauty born of murmuring sound
30Shall pass into her face.
31"And vital feelings of delight
32Shall rear her form to stately height,
33Her virgin bosom swell;
34Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
35While she and I together live
36Here in this happy dell."
37Thus Nature spake—the work was done—
38How soon my Lucy's race was run!
39She died, and left to me
40This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
41The memory of what has been,
42And never more will be.
The Full Text of “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower”
1Three years she grew in sun and shower,
2Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
3On earth was never sown;
4This Child I to myself will take;
5She shall be mine, and I will make
6A Lady of my own.
7"Myself will to my darling be
8Both law and impulse: and with me
9The Girl, in rock and plain,
10In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
11Shall feel an overseeing power
12To kindle or restrain.
13"She shall be sportive as the fawn
14That wild with glee across the lawn
15Or up the mountain springs;
16And hers shall be the breathing balm,
17And hers the silence and the calm
18Of mute insensate things.
19"The floating clouds their state shall lend
20To her; for her the willow bend;
21Nor shall she fail to see
22Even in the motions of the Storm
23Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
24By silent sympathy.
25"The stars of midnight shall be dear
26To her; and she shall lean her ear
27In many a secret place
28Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
29And beauty born of murmuring sound
30Shall pass into her face.
31"And vital feelings of delight
32Shall rear her form to stately height,
33Her virgin bosom swell;
34Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
35While she and I together live
36Here in this happy dell."
37Thus Nature spake—the work was done—
38How soon my Lucy's race was run!
39She died, and left to me
40This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
41The memory of what has been,
42And never more will be.
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“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Introduction
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"Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower" is one of Romantic poet William Wordsworth's mysterious "Lucy poems," a sequence in which an anonymous speaker mourns the woman he loved. Here, the speaker describes Lucy's upbringing. A woman so perfectly calm, wise, beautiful, and playful, he imagines, could only have been raised by Nature itself. With a character as harmonious and balanced as the seasons, Lucy has everything—except, alas, immortality. Wordsworth first published this poem in the 1800 second edition of Lyrical Ballads, one of the most influential collections of poetry in English.
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“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Summary
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Lucy grew up to be three years old, living through sunshine and rain. Then Nature declared, "The world has never grown a lovelier flower than this child. I'll take her into my care and make her into a lady of my very own design.
"I'll give my beloved daughter both guidance and energy. Under my care, this girl—whether on the rocky plains, on the earth or in the sky, in clearings or under the trees—will feel like a guardian of the natural world, able to spark new action or hold it back.
"She'll be as playful as the baby deer that leaps across the lawn or up the mountainside. And she'll be as utterly peaceful, quiet, and calm as the world's inanimate objects.
"The clouds that float by will give her their dignity; the willow tree will bed down for her. She'll never be blind to the grace that's there even in the wildest storms, and that grace will silently shape her body.
"She'll love the midnight stars, and she'll listen to the sound of hidden streams dancing wildly. Her face will become as beautiful as their sounds.
"Lively, energetic joy will make her grow to a dignified height and fill out her youthful figure. I'll give all these thoughts to Lucy while she and I live together in this lovely valley."
That's what Nature said, and it did just what it intended to. But Lucy's life was over so soon! She died, leaving me with only this calm, quiet field, and with my memories of what once was and will never be again.
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“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Themes
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Nature and Humanity
In "Three Years She Grew," Nature itself falls a little in love with a young girl called Lucy and decides that it's going to raise her to be the perfect woman. The best way it can think of to do that is to model all her charms on its own: Lucy will be as calm as a stone, as lively as a fawn, and as beautiful as the sound of running water. The poem's speaker, a man who loved Lucy and lost her, altogether agrees that these qualities made her the best sort of person you could possibly be. A life lived close to nature and in imitation of nature, this poem suggests, is a life lived ideally.
The gifts that Nature gives Lucy make her perfectly balanced. Like a fawn, she can be "sportive" (or playful); like a stone, she can enjoy "silence and calm." She's able to find the beauty in "the motions of the Storm" just as easily as she does in the "stars of midnight" or the "murmuring sound" of a hidden stream. She can equally call on her powers "to kindle or restrain," to act when it's right and to stay still when it's right.
All of this delightful equilibrium mirrors Nature's own. In teaching Lucy to be a perfectly balanced and lovely person, Nature is essentially teaching her to be just like Nature. As the natural world makes beauty out of storms and calms, energy and stillness, so will Lucy.
To Nature and the speaker alike, this way of being seems ideal. Though Lucy is gone now, the speaker still loves and remembers her precisely because of her nature-like perfections. Nature, in this poem, is the best teacher, inspiring a mixture of beauty, delight, equilibrium, strength, and intelligence in those wise enough to follow in its footsteps.
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Mortality and Grief
The poem's speaker deeply loved someone named Lucy and imagines that she was Nature's own best-beloved child. He can remember all of her qualities—her beauty, her calm, her playfulness—as if she were in front of him even now. Being part of Nature, of course, also means that Lucy is and was part of the cycle of life and death. That fact is more difficult for the speaker to face. Death, in this poem, is both perfectly natural and terribly hard to accept or understand.
Most of the poem recalls how Lucy grew up. Tutored by Nature itself, she became calm, beautiful, happy, and wise, all qualities the speaker remembers tenderly. Clearly, this speaker adored Lucy just as personified Nature did: she was so perfect, in his eyes, that it was as if his beloved English countryside had turned into a living woman.
Only at the end of the poem does the speaker reveal a sad, flat fact: after Nature's "work was done," Lucy died. In one sense, of course, death is the inevitable end of all of Nature's works: nature, having perfected Lucy, finishes the job by taking her back into the earth. But to the speaker, left sitting alone in the "calm, and quiet scene" where Lucy once lived, it feels as if Nature completed its Lucy project far too quickly: "How soon my Lucy's race was run!" he laments. Lucy died too young. Now, haunted by "the memory of what has been, / And never more will be," the speaker can't move on.
Though death is as much a part of nature as beauty and new life, the poem thus suggests, it’s the hardest part to swallow. Losing a beloved, especially an all-too-young beloved, is agonizing and bewildering. The speaker can still look on the "heath" (or wild field) that reminds him of Lucy and perhaps even take some comfort in the thought that she's now part of the earth in death. But he must also reckon with the fact that, unlike that heath, Lucy won't be coming back good as new in the springtime.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower”
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Lines 1-6
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own."Three Years She Grew" begins in the childhood of a woman called Lucy—a woman whom readers of Wordsworth might know from the "Lucy" sequence, a series of five poems in which a mysterious speaker mourns the loss of his beloved Lucy and marvels at the strangeness of death. In most of these poems, Lucy is a phantom, a figure the speaker misses deeply but doesn’t describe directly. This poem alone gives readers a direct picture of Lucy's loveliness.
In the speaker's vision, Lucy was born special. For the first "three years" of her life, he imagines, she grew "in sun and shower," sprouting up like a little wildflower. By then, he says, Lucy had become so lovely that Nature—personified here as a kindly deity—took notice, and decided to adopt her:
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.Lucy, in other words, was Nature's own child, reared by the land she lived in. Metaphorically speaking, she was that way from the start, a "lovelier flower" than any in the fields. To the speaker—and to Wordsworth, whose poetry often encouraged its readers to "let nature be your teacher"—a person raised by Nature (and amid nature) must inevitably be wise, beautiful, lively, and happy. This poem will tell the story of a person in harmony with the world, up to and beyond the day of her death.
It will do so in a form rather like a stretched-out ballad:
- Wordsworth often used ballad stanzas: quatrains (or four-line stanzas) whose lines rhyme ABCB. The meter alternates between iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Thus Na- | ture spake— | the work | was done") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "The Girl, | in rock | and plain").
- This poem preserves most of these qualities: it just adds an extra A line and an extra C line in each stanza, creating an AABCCB rhyme scheme. Each stanza thus contains four tetrameter lines, not two.
This shape makes the poem feel like an old folk song wistfully drawn out just a little longer than usual, as if the speaker wants to linger on his memories of Lucy for as long as he can.
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Lines 7-12
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain. -
Lines 13-18
"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things. -
Lines 19-24
"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy. -
Lines 25-30
"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face. -
Lines 31-36
"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell." -
Lines 37-42
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.
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“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
By personifying Nature as a mighty but affectionate deity, the poem suggests that the natural world can be a guide, a teacher, and a parent—and that human beings might hope to model themselves on nature's example.
At the beginning of the poem, Nature waits around for a minute to watch little Lucy grow from birth to three years old, sprouting up like a flower through "sun and shower." That's all the time it needs to decide that "she shall be mine, and I shall make / A Lady of my own." Here, Nature becomes an artist, molding Lucy in its own image:
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: [...]In other words, Nature makes Lucy into a little copy of itself, giving her both its "law" (its structure and rules) and its creative energy. In fact, Nature's whole personality seems to be about such balances. Being Nature-like, Nature reveals, means having a perfect blend of energy and calm, playfulness and seriousness, joy and wisdom.
Being Nature-like also involves being able to find beauty in troubled places: the wild “motion of the Storm” itself, Nature declares, will only give Lucy more grace. Nature, then, is unflappable. Even the most dangerous energy fits into Nature's grand scheme.
If Nature is loving, wise, and balanced, it's also stern. Its "law" is a law of death as well as life. When Lucy dies, it's as if Nature is completing its work on her by fully absorbing her, literally making her part of itself (an idea that Wordsworth returns to in another of the Lucy poems, "A slumber did my spirit seal").
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Imagery
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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"Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower" 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.
- Sown
- Impulse
- Kindle
- Sportive
- Glee
- Balm
- Mute insensate things
- State
- Wayward round
- Vital
- Dell
- Spake
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Planted.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower”
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Form
One of the longer of Wordsworth's Lucy poems, "Three Years She Grew" is also the only poem in the series that describes Lucy herself in much detail. (Most of the other Lucy poems present her as more of a phantom or a shadow, focusing on the speaker's grief at losing her.) Over the course of its seven sestets (or six-line stanzas), the poem evokes Lucy's grace, wisdom, cheer, and calm by picturing her as Nature's own child.
These sestets almost feel like expanded ballad stanzas:
- The ballad stanza uses an ABCB rhyme scheme and uses four lines, alternating between iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm: "And hers | shall be | the breath- | ing balm") and iambic trimeter (three iambs: "A La- | dy of | my own").
- This poem's stanzas have a lot of these same features but introduce extra lines of iambic tetrameter: two four-beat lines alternate with a three-beat line, so that the rhymes run AABCCB.
The overall effect is of a ballad stanza drawn out, long and thoughtful. It's as if the speaker is trying to stretch out his reminiscences of Lucy just a little longer, since her "race was run" all too quickly.
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Meter
"Three Years She Grew" uses a mixture of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. All the lines are built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, but some use four iambs (tetrameter) and some use three (trimeter).
Here's how that sounds in lines 13-15:
"She shall | be sport- | ive as | the fawn
That wild | with glee | across | the lawn
Or up | the moun- | tain springs;This form feels rather as if an extra couple of tetrameter lines were added to ballad meter. Ballad stanzas, an old shape inherited from folk songs, were important to Wordsworth, part of his ethical as well as his poetic project. He and his collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge called their groundbreaking joint collection Lyrical Ballads because they felt that simple, earthy, accessible language (the "ballad" part) could better express intense feeling and thought (the "lyrical" part) than ornate, highfalutin verse could.
By playing with a familiar shape in his meter, Wordsworth thus makes Lucy's tale sound at once timeless and intensely personal.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's rhyme scheme runs like this:
AABCCB
This pattern creates a steady, breathing, pulsing motion in the lines. Each B rhyme lands on a shorter line of iambic trimeter, making the stanzas feel gently expectant: there's a little hush before the poem moves on to close the rhyme.
The rhyme scheme here also feels like an expansion of good old ballad rhyme, which runs ABCB. The extra rhymes make it feel rather as if the speaker is stalling a little, trying to stretch out his lovely memories of Lucy's youth for as long as possible before he hits the inescapable end of her story.
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“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is the same mysterious figure who appears in all the Lucy poems: a quiet, thoughtful, grief-stricken watcher, with a personality and life history not unlike Wordsworth's own.
Most of the poem, however, is told in the voice of Nature itself. Nature watches Lucy grow up for "three years" before deciding to make a special project of her; readers get the sense that Lucy must have been born special for Nature to take such an interest. Once it's chosen Lucy, Nature speaks like a deity, declaring that it will mold its adoptive daughter in its own image: Lucy will be playful as a fawn, calm as a stone, stately as a cloud.
The speaker confidently reports on how Nature must have nurtured Lucy, as if he had a special power of insight. But he has no power to bring Lucy back now that she's gone. What Nature molded, he laments, Nature took away.
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“Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Setting
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By all indications, "Three Years She Grew" is set in Wordsworth's native English countryside—and more specifically, in the Lake District, the region he lived in for much of his life. The images of rocky plains, leafy glades, dancing streams, and soaring clouds all call to mind the particular beauties of this area, whose hills and valleys Wordsworth tirelessly explored.
The landscape Wordsworth loved seems to love people back, here: a personified, adoring Nature becomes Lucy's foster parent and tutor. Under Nature's guiding hand, Lucy won't develop, say, the ferocity of a jagged icy mountain, but the sweet glee of a little deer and the loveliness of a tiny hidden stream. "Even the motions of the Storm," as the speaker says, feel graceful in such a landscape and will give Lucy their grace in turn.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower”
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Literary Context
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote "Three Years She Grew" in 1799, early in his revolutionary poetic heyday. Alongside his friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth kicked off the English Romantic movement with the 1798 book Lyrical Ballads, a collection that proclaimed poetry should use everyday, earthy language (that's the "ballad" part) to explore the depths of the soul and the imagination (the "lyrical" part).
These were very new ideas in the 18th century, whose most prominent writers (like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope) were more interested in satirical, elegant wit than plainspoken sincerity. But Wordsworth's and Coleridge's innovations would change poetry forever. Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," for example, meditated on nature and memory in a way that was completely novel in its time—and has now become a perfect example of what readers expect poetry to do.
Wordsworth published "Three Years She Grew" in the 1800 second edition of Lyrical Ballads. It's one of the five "Lucy poems," a sequence dealing with a speaker's grief over a mysterious beloved. There's no critical consensus about whether the "Lucy" the poems mourn was based on a real person. But one theory is that these poems might in part express Wordsworth's sorrow over his fraught relationship with Coleridge. The two men, along with Wordsworth's brilliant sister Dorothy, shared a short period of intense creative inspiration. For a few magical years, they lived and worked closely together, going for long walks, discussing literature, and composing poetry.
But Wordsworth and Coleridge were very different. Wordsworth was disciplined, arrogant, and fully persuaded of his own genius; Coleridge was erratic, inspired, and insecure, prone to addictions and hopeless loves. After the pair's brief period of shared genius, they drifted apart: Wordsworth grew frustrated with Coleridge's moods and frenzies, and Coleridge was heartbroken by Wordsworth's rejection.
A flashpoint in the relationship came when Wordsworth published the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800. By this time, Wordsworth was conscious of his status as a public poet—and of his and Coleridge's stylistic disagreements. He revised Lyrical Ballads to play down Coleridge's contributions, even taking Coleridge's name off the title page. This was the first in a long series of blows, disagreements, and misunderstandings that would erode the pair's friendship.
But the great collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge lives beyond "the touch of earthly years." Their work was a major inspiration to younger Romantic poets like John Keats and to future generations of writers.
Historical Context
Wordsworth's poetry was part of a Romantic backlash against the elegant, satirical, and often merciless clarity of the Age of Enlightenment. This period of the 18th century was marked by huge scientific advances, but also by what the later Romantics saw as a bit too much reason. Where earlier Renaissance scholars and artists tried to know a little bit about everything, Enlightenment thinkers were categorizers and organizers, increasingly interested in sharp divisions between disciplines—and increasingly confident in their ability to unravel all the world's mysteries, given enough time.
The art of that era, similarly, had an orderly, reasoned wit that Wordsworth and his contemporaries began to find rather deadening. Romantics like William Blake and John Keats wanted to break out of the crystalline prison of Enlightenment-era poetry, preferring the wide, dark, glimmering world of the imagination. The godlike Nature of this poem is Romantic to the core, suggesting as it does that the world contains wisdom above and beyond what the human intellect can reach on its own steam.
The Romantic movement was also in part a rebellion against the Industrial Revolution, which was built on the back of Enlightenment advances in science and technology. As the countryside began to disappear beneath expanding cities and filthy factories, thinkers like Wordsworth tried to remind readers that nature was full of irreplaceable beauty and wisdom—qualities that can't be commodified. Presenting Lucy as an idealized embodiment of Nature itself, the speaker here suggests that the natural world contains all the wisdom, goodness, and pleasure a human being needs.
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More “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Lyrical Ballads — See images from the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the important collection in which this poem first appeared.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Wordsworth's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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More on the Lucy Poems — Read a New Yorker article discussing Wordsworth's strange, haunting Lucy poems.
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Wordsworth's Legacy — Visit the Wordsworth Society to learn more about Wordsworth's continuing influence.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth
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