A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I’ve always really enjoyed this Wordsworth poem, a poem that seems highly unusual. The first two lines are about the speaker “a slumber did my spirit seal/ I had no human fears” but the second two lines of that first stanza and the entire second stanza focus entirely on the she (Lucy?). Or does the she in the third line refer to the spirit of the first line? What does it mean to have no “human” fears? This suggests that there are fears that are beyond human ones. If this is true then the speaker still has fears but the fears are more gigantic, more uncommon than the usual human ones. The slumber seems like it could mean death as in dead, gone, goner but it could also mean some sort of spiritual death–as in being trapped in a zombie-like state, the walking dead. The word “seal” is also particularly interesting as in to seal off which would be very different from saying something like “a slumber did my spirit TOTALLY CRUSH.” In any case, the first stanza doesn’t seem like death to me, at least not death as in the end, finito. If the she in the third line refers to the spirit, then it would make sense that the spirit would not be able to feel the “touch of earthly years” BUT if the she refers to another person (Lucy), then it would suggest that he refers to the timelessness of her spirit because she has died. What I don’t understand is why there’s a shift from the first person to the second person mid-stanza in this poem and why the “I” never comes back. And if she (Lucy) seems “a thing that can’t feel,” it doesn’t mean she can’t, she only “seems.” Ah, so frustrating and weird. Anyway, moving onto the second stanza of this thing. It seems clear by the second stanza that we’re looking at another person who has died (Lucy, or whoever). Bravo, Wordsworth, it’s like you were in my Physics class at UCLA: “force,” “motion”, “roll’d” and “course” all make me think of planetary motion, the movement of celestial bodies. I’m not a WW scholar, but I’m wondering if he read up on the planets? Probably would be something good to look up. But this all points to a closed system, the movement of large bodies of matter through a cold and chaotic space in an organized fashion, the space of awe. So, where is the human body? Well she’s the one rolled up in it with all of the “rocks” and “stones” and “trees.” It’s strange how he says that she “neither hears nor sees” which makes me look back to the first stanza where he says she seemed a thing that couldn’t feel—worth comparing the confidence of how she can’t see or hear but only seems not to feel. And it seems like this is somehow related to the idea of the spirit, or the soul. Why the redundancy of rocks and stone and then to end on trees? Why, Willy Wordsworth? I guess an easy reading would be that she sort of comes to life again at the end, now that she is “at one” with nature, but I think the poem is a little bit more frightening than that; in a sense, less optimistic. My last thought here, and I know this is a a totally insane stretch, is that the I of the beginning has seen a ghost in his sleep! He doesn’t have human fears, but instead, fears the ghostly presence. That’s why he goes from talking about sleep to focusing on the “she” in that first stanza. In this reading, that last stanza actually makes a lot of sense to me. She’s alive, but she isn’t. Her body is rolled up with the trees, but she’s also there haunting him. That’s all I’ve got on this one. Ghost or not, I really love this poem. If you have another reading of this (which I’m sure you do), I’d love to know what you think.