William Wordsworth born in 1770 is considered one the two fathers of The

British Romantic Movement. In 1789 Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Colridge

wrote a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Balladswich emulated the
romantic poems that were becoming increasingly popular in Germany and
France. Inspired by the beauty of Northearn Englands Lake District,the poems
attempted to capture the human emotions in words. Emotions such as love,
rejection and loss were very popular in the romantic era. And nowere
is this more profound than in Wordsworths collection of 5 poems
know as The Lucy Poems. Wordsworth wrote Lucy Poems while
homesick on vacation with his older sister Dorothy. Each one of the 5
poems describes a narrator who is desperatly in love with a girl, in a
small village, who dies before ever learning of the narrators true
feelings. While many belive that there is no real life inspiration for Lucy,
stating that Lucy is just an ideal concept of love and womenhood , others have
argued that given the deepts of feelings Wordsworth seems to capture in his
poems, maybe there really was a Lucy. Lucys true identity however remains
one of the literate mysteries of all time. In 1980, Hunter Davies contended
that the series was written for the poet's sister Dorothy, but found the
LucyDorothy allusion "bizarre". Earlier, literary critic Richard Matlak tried
to explain the LucyDorothy connection, and wrote that Dorothy represented a
financial burden to Wordsworth, which had effectively forced his separation
from Coleridge. Wordsworth, depressed over the separation from his friend, in
this interpretation, expresses both his love for his sister and fantasies about
her loss through the poems. Throughout the poems, the narrator's mixture of
mourning and antipathy is accompanied by denial and guilt; his denial of the
LucyDorothy relationship and the lack of narratorial responsibility for the
death of Lucy allow him to escape from questioning his desires for the death of
his sister. The series is generally considered to examine two broad themes:
NATURE: According to critics, Wordsworth built his reputation as a "poet of
nature". Early works, such as "Tintern Abbey", can be viewed as odes to his
experience of nature. His poems can also be seen as lyrical meditations on the
fundamental character of the natural world. Wordsworth said that, as a youth,
nature stirred "an appetite, a feeling and a love", but by the time he wrote
Lyrical Ballads, it evoked "the still sad music of humanity". The five "Lucy
poems" are often interpreted as representing Wordsworth's opposing views of
nature as well as meditations on the cycle of life. They describe a variety of
relationships between humanity and nature. Wordsworth sometimes described
nature more than Lucy herself. Although the poems evoke a sense of loss,
they also hint at the completeness of Lucy's lifeshe was raised by
nature and survives in the memories of others.
DEATH: The narrator is affected greatly by Lucy's death and cries out in "She
dwelt" of "the difference to me!". Yet in "A slumber" he is spared from trauma
by sleep. Her death suggests that nature can bring pain to all, even to those
who loved her. The "Lucy poems" often fail to distinguish the difference
between life and death. They describe a rite of passage from innocent
childhood to corrupted maturity
MOODS:

The poems are about a muse: love, or object of affection, inspiration loved from afar and the poet's/speaker dealing with the death of that
person (Lucy). Compounding that grief is that Lucy was the inspiration for
the poet's creativity. So, the mood is elegiac, melancholy. Other themes
and moods are nostalgia, imagination and memory which dominate a lot
of Wordsworth's poetry.