By close critical reading, establish which if any of Wordsworths Lucy poems deserves to be regarded as the odd-one-out.

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Riya Panchal        Summer 2010        Coursework

By close critical reading, establish which – if any – of Wordsworth’s “‘Lucy’” poems deserves to be regarded as the odd-one-out.

 ‘Strange fits of passion I have known’ is about a man on a horse to see his lover. ‘my horse drew nigh those paths so dear to me.’ The horse knew exactly where he was going so no instructions needed. Wordsworth had written this poem so it has a parallax effect, and the readers view changes going through the poem. The rhyme scheme for this poem is abab, the wording to this poem was complicated but the words fitted perfectly as there was no word that wasn’t needed. Wordsworth probably based this poem on a newspaper story. ‘Fresh as a rose in June’ comparing a woman to a rose means that she is very pretty at the start then after some time its starts to wither and become unimportant and ugly then eventually dies, so this means she won’t last. This poem is based on romance and weirdness not hate but at the end of the poem ‘Lucy’ is dead.

‘‘‘Lucy’ Gray, or ‘Solitude’’ the base of this poem is that there are three characters- a little girl called ‘Lucy’, her mother and her father- a summary of the poem would be, her mother goes out to town and a blizzard starts, ‘Lucy’ goes out to find her mother- by the father sending her out, her mother comes back fine – she is an adult she would know how to get back, they go out shouting for her ‘wretched parents all that night went shouting far and wide’ and they can’t find her ‘neither sound nor sight to serve them for a guide’.  The wording used is a simple and easy story technique and is very easy to understand. The voice of this poem is solitary or alone. This poem is like the other poems because it has the same theme ‘‘Lucy’’ but this one is more specific because she has a surname. This poem is filled with stunning pictures created for the mind a different portrait for each stanza.

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‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’ for this poem Wordsworth uses more complex English so it is harder to understand, but he is right back to where he started off by using word but in different orders to make it sound better, like it has a purpose. This poem had two voices: the voice of nature and the narrator’s voice. The rhyming pattern is aabccb. The first stanza is about a young girl, who dies at the age of three. She then becomes part of nature ‘this child I to myself take; she shall be mine, and I ...

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