Content Warning: This section includes child death and gender discrimination. 

“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” by William Wordsworth (1800)

This is one of Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems.” Unlike “A Slumber,” the speaker in “She Dwelt,” names the “she.” The girl is clearly Lucy. More so, the speaker doesn’t allude to Lucy’s death but directly confronts it, using the term “grave.” Both poems blend the girl with nature, but in “She Dwelt,” Lucy mixes with nature while alive. Once she dies, the speaker becomes overtly dismayed, suggesting that Lucy won’t live on in nature; instead, Lucy has met a concrete end. She’s “ceased to be,” (Line 10), so the speaker won’t see her in the rocks, trees, and stones. 

“The World Is Too Much with Us” by Williams Wordsworth (1807)

“The World” isn’t one of Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems,” yet it illustrates what the girl in “A Slumber” missed by dying early. “The World” presents human life as volatile and dispiriting. People misuse their potential and become alienated from nature. The menacing world makes the speaker gloomy and wish that they were something other than human. In conversation with “A Slumber,” the girl represents innocence because she didn’t have to experience the world’s upset. The early death becomes a gift. Unlike the disorientated living humans, the girl becomes one with nature, possessing a harmony unavailable to the living.

“She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron (1814)

As with “A Slumber,” Lord Byron creates an ethereal image of an unnamed girl. Byron’s girl symbolizes not only innocence but beauty. In Byron’s poem, the beauty and innocence are due to the girl’s gender. His speaker perpetuates the problematic archetype of the pure, virtuous, proper girl. In “A Slumber,” the girl’s innocence is less overtly gendered. She’s literally innocent because she died before she could have many experiences. More so, death reaffirms her innocence; it relieves her of human agency and the capacity to cause harm or experience the tumult of the human world.