Wordsworth Essay

Introduction

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Outline

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Essay

When faced with death, every young parent becomes a liar. Little Billy looks up at you, eyes filled with brine, begging to know where Rover has gone. You know that Rover is now underneath the begonias, but you tell Billy that Rover is in heaven, chasing rabbits, eating prime rib, and watching over him faithfully. Billy walks away, sad but hopefully. Dad rolls his eyes at another whopper.

Dad has done the opposite of Wordsworth’s narrator in “We are Seven”; he has lied to protect innocence. Innocence, in this case, is the ignorance of death. If we are ignorant of death, we live without fear. No Grim Reaper goes drunken driving in the street that we play, no sickle shaped virus can come to us from a doorknob, and no black cloud will descend on us in the night. We are fearless.

As a result, the children can play as the little girl does in Wordsworth’s poem. She darns her socks and plays with her dolls out in the glory of the hundred-acre wood, with no knowledge of death. Even though her brother and sister have died, she sits and sings with them, then shares her porridge in the evening. She has kept this reality out of her head by a remarkable force of will. Their deaths cannot be acknowledged.

Our narrator finds himself in a tricky spot here. On one hand, he rhetorically asked us “What should she know of death” in the fourth of line of the poem. On the other hand, he screams at her in the final stanza, trying to get it through her thick skull that her siblings are dead. The poem doesn’t explain why he is an all-fired hurry to remove her illusion and innocence.

Perhaps the best explanation is that he is jealous. This young eight-year-old is playing carefree about the forest, while he walks with a heavy heart. While her beauty “made him glad,” he apparently wanted more from her. Not being satisfied with her beauty, he wants to depress her, as he is depressed. She is a blank bathroom wall, and he has a permanent marker.

In this way, the narrator is a “Dropper in the Rye.” Where Holden wants to preserve the little kid’s innocence by catching them, this guy wants to ruin them by calling them over the cliff’s edge, then letting them drop to bruises, injuries, and death. Where Holden tries to keep as many kids in the rye field as he could, this guy wants to empty the field as soon as possible.

Yet, the girl keeps her innocence, plays with her brother and sister in the graveyard, and ignores the mean man. Like Little Billy, she goes to sleep each night thinking of ghostly friends beside her. Like Mrs. MacAuley, she will celebrate life wherever she finds it and deny the reality of death. In the end, then, the poem poses a question to all of us: What’s wrong with that lie?