22 pages • 44 minutes read
We Are Seven
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Themes
Different Perspectives of Adult and Child
In the opening stanzas the adult man expresses aesthetic appreciation for the eight-year-old girl who lives in the country cottage. He admires her beauty and her “rustic, woodland air” (Line 9). Here, she exists as an object of admiration for him, rather than a person with her own ideas and experiences.
The conflict that reveals the difference between them begins in Stanza 4, when the man asks about her brothers and sisters, “How many may you be?” (Line 14). She replies, “Seven in all” (Line 15), but it soon becomes clear that two of those siblings—a sister and a brother—are dead, and “in the churchyard lie” (Line 21). Naturally enough, the adult is puzzled that the girl insists that there are still seven of them. She does not have a shadow of doubt about this, however, saying it three times within the space of five stanzas (Stanzas 4, 5, and 8).
Baffled, the speaker tries to explain to her that in fact, she has only five siblings now. He carefully points out the difference between the living and the dead; she is alive (“You run about, my little Maid, / Your limbs they are alive” [Lines 33-34]), in contrast to the two children who lie in their graves. Nothing, however, can shake the girl’s belief that they are still seven. From her point of view, her dead siblings are still present: “Their graves are green, they may be seen” (Line 37), and she continues to feel a connection with them. She often sits by their graves and knits, sews, or sings to her brother and sister. Sometimes she eats her supper there too. For her, their presence remains real and substantial, so she carries on with the activities she used to do with them before they went to lie in the churchyard. All this is beyond the understanding of the adult, to whom the two children are dead, leaving only five siblings to count. Simple arithmetic, patiently explained more than once, does not help him; the girl insists on maintaining her own reality, completely immune to the logic of her adult visitor.
Imagination Versus Reason
On first glance, the poem might suggest a simple comparison, that the child is too young to understand death, while the adult is secure in his mature knowledge. However, closer reading suggests a more complex picture. While the adult knows something the child does not, the reverse is also true. Their conflicting spheres of understanding can be described as a contrast between imagination and reason. Wordsworth the Romantic poet strongly believed in the power of the imagination as the ideal purpose of the human mind. Imagination is able to apprehend the unity of life, whereas reason is, as he puts it in The Prelude, a “false, secondary power” that sees only limitations and boundaries. In Wordsworth’s poetic world, the child still has the imagination that the adult speaker, clinging only to a cold, logical version of the world, has lost. The child maintains an awareness of connectedness—though her siblings have died, she fosters a relationship with them by visiting their graves and performing the same activities she used to in life. She sees no reason not to carry on doing the things with them that she used to do when they could still “run about” (Line 33). She has not yet learned to see her family in the way that a census-taker might (although as she grows up, she may), so the concept of death has no meaning for her. Seen in this light, the little girl is a visionary and the adult has been dulled by his longer existence. His world has shrunk until it consists only of the observable realities experienced by the senses; it has lost the shine and wonder of childhood.
While the poem’s speaker is frustrated by what he perceives as the girl’s intransigence, Wordsworth is careful to present the child as intelligent and able to understand the day-to-day world in which she exists. She knows very well how to count, which she emphasizes when she explains that the “green” (Line 37) graves of her two siblings are “[t]welve steps or more from my mother’s door” (Line 39)—a precise measurement. The connection she feels with her siblings is based in childhood, but it is not childish—it is real and substantial.
The Validity of Both Sides
Many readers may reach the conclusion that the poem is interested in them taking one side or the other—in identifying either the adult or the child as right and therefore considering the other wrong. However, Wordsworth is careful never to actually privilege one point of view as superior to the other. Instead, the poem is a debate in which both sides put their case well and both are valid in their own way, even though both may also have their limitations.
From the adult point of view, death is an indisputable marker of a radical change; whatever world the dead may inhabit (the speaker suggests they have gone to heaven), they are no longer, from the human point of view, in the land of the living. From the child point of view, the certainty of the girl’s visionary imagination, and the fact that her actions remain true to her vision and understanding, cannot be denied, even though she does not have the mature understanding to grasp concepts such as death and the afterlife. (She does not react, for example, when the adult twice tries to point out that the two dead siblings are in heaven.) The little girl therefore has much still to learn.
However, a reasonable conclusion is that the poem presents the notion that life is experienced very differently in childhood and adulthood in this one particular aspect, and as they talk about it, the child and the adult are simply being true to their own experiences of life.
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By William Wordsworth
