I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about _We are Seven_.
Wordsworth's friend, James Tobin, who saw the _Lyrical Ballads_ while
they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make
him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I
have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of
the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever
heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the
'moral' of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the
'moral' given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative
impression from which the poem arose.
The 'moral' is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated
opening stanza:
--------A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was
all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed
that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea
better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza
as we have it, except that the first line ran, 'A simple child, dear
brother Jim,'--this Jim, who rhymes with 'limb,' being the James Tobin
who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the
_Lyrical Ballads_ as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the
words 'dear brother Jim' as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for
the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.
Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a felicity of
style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing
the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but,
according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he
wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a
doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience
from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this
doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge's
authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having read _We are
Seven_ without feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, 'This
means more than the first stanza says.' And, however improbable, it
cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as
Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I
will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred
him was the coincidence of the child's feelings with some of those
feelings of his own childhood which he described in the Immortality
_Ode_, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less
individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs,
to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer
to one or two passages. 'At that time I could not believe that I should
lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust'
(remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, _Prose Works_, ed. Grosart, iii.
464). Is not this the condition of the child in _We are Seven_?
'Nothing,' he says to Miss Fenwick, 'was more difficult for me in
childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my
own being' (_ib._ iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza of _We are
Seven_. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own
case from the child's, attributing the difficulty in her case to 'animal
vivacity.' But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth's direct
testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a
passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by
saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead 'proceeded
obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the
deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and,
secondly, to preserve their memory.' But these desires, in his opinion,
resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or
fore-feeling of immortality, also described as 'an intimation or
assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.' And
he goes on thus: 'If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall
find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own
individual Being, the mind was without this assurance.... Forlorn, and
cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that
man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the
mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal
spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational
creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of
his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a
notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been
instilled into him!' Now Coleridge's stanza, and Wordsworth's own
distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to
attributing the child's inability to realise the fact of death to that
very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is
here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this
inability ought to have been traced to that 'sense' or 'consciousness'
of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no
Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was _this_, I suggest, that,
unknown to himself, arrested him in the child's persistent ignoring of
the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality _Ode_. The
child is in possession of one of those 'truths that wake to perish
never,' though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of
custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took
place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth
had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he
saw them later (_Tintern Abbey_, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to
the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted
from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even
to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly
significant that the child in _We are Seven_ is not described as showing
any particular 'animal vivacity': she strikes one as rather a quiet,
though determined, little person.
These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who
feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But
many, I think, must feel them.