"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.