In the novel Human Comedy, Ulysses is a small boy who's father is dead, but he doesn't understand this. He keeps asking his mother when his father is coming home, but she tells him that he is gone and never coming home.

Ulysses is very similar to the little girl in "We are Seven;" both are unaware of death, and therefore innocent. In class innocence was defined as the ignorance of death. Both children have experienced death, Ulysses with his father and the girl with her siblings, but neither understand or accept it.

The little girl in the Wordsworth poem refuses to accept the deaths in her family. She does not understand that her brother and sister are dead. Since she has no knowledge, she has not lost anything. She still talks, sings, and plays with her lost siblings. No one can make her understand that they are gone in the deepest sense of the word, but there is one person who tries to bring the girl to this realization. The narrator of the poem tries to tell us that he doesn't believe that the girl should know anything about death, but then he screams at her, yelling, "But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!" This man wants to take away the girl's innocence and peace of mind. What kind of person is this if he is trying to ruin this child?

The girl in the story refuses to acknowledge the deaths of her brother and sister, and the narrator can not understand how she could deceive herself so completely. He thinks that children should know nothing of death, but if it has happened to them, he doesn't know how they can avoid it. He has trouble understanding how he can be in such a foul mood while this girl, who has suffered the death of two family members, can run and play in the woods. Maybe he wants to make her understand the pain that he is feeling, and the only way that is possible is to disillusion her.

The girl does not give in though. She insists that her family is still intact, and that the narrator is wrong. She must wonder why he feels so strongly about something that is so totally wrong. We, of course, know that the girl does not understand the truth. Maybe she will one day understand the fear that is death, like Ulysses with Mr. Mechano. For now, however, she is able to run back into the forest, climb the trees, pretend that her brother and sister are there with her, and forget the strange man that walked through her wood one day.