Plot Summary
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798
Plot Summary
“We Are Seven,” a poem by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, originally appeared in Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798), a collection Wordsworth wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the “Advertisement,” which introduces the volume, Wordsworth writes that the poems are “experimental,” written in order to determine if the language and daily lives of the lower classes can be “adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” Accordingly, “We are Seven” features a debate over death between a “little cottage girl” and the poem’s unnamed, but presumably educated and male speaker.
Consisting of seventeen stanzas, “We Are Seven” begins with the speaker’s reflections on the vitality and simplicity of childhood and his rhetorical question, “What should it know of death?”
The second stanza introduces an eight-year-old girl, with whom the speaker has a chance encounter. His observations that the girl “had a rustic, woodland air” and “was wildly clad” use imagery that identifies the girl with nature and the lower social classes. The speaker ends his description of the girl with the declaration, “Her beauty made me glad.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker and the girl begin their exchange. The speaker asks how many brothers and sisters she has, and the girl replies, “Seven are we.” As the girl is alone, the speaker continues his line of questioning and asks about her six siblings: “Where are they, I pray you tell?” When the girl explains that two are sea voyagers, two live in the Welsh town of Conway, and two are lying in the churchyard beside the cottage she shares with her mother, her calculations confuse the speaker. Remarking on the vital difference between the girl, who can “run about,” and the two children entombed in graves, the speaker dismisses the latter from the equation. He concludes, “Then ye are only five.”
However, the girl counters his logic. She argues that her siblings’ “graves are green,” which is a sign of life, and “they may be seen,” which is evidence of existence. Moreover, as the two buried children lie just steps from her cottage door, the girl spends much of her time with them. She sits beside them while she knits or sews, and sometimes she sings to them. She often eats her supper with them. Indeed, her graveyard siblings are present for many of her daily activities, unlike her living siblings, who have moved away.
In the thirteenth stanza, the girl explains why her brother and sister are lying in the churchyard. Her sister, “little Jane,” fell ill. Because she was lying in bed, moaning, God set Jane free from her pain. “Then she went away” to lie peacefully in the churchyard.
That summer, the girl and her brother, John, played together around little Jane’s grave. When winter arrived, turning the ground “white with snow,” the girl “could run and slide.” John, however, “was forced to go” lie in the ground beside Jane. Despite the fact that her brother and sister are no longer active, the girl reasons that they’re still within reach – “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door” – and remain part of her family.
As the girl has just acknowledged that God intervened in the lives of her brother and sister, the speaker tries a third time to make her see her counting error and correct it. He asks again, “How many are you then, […] if two are in Heaven?” She stubbornly repeats, “We are seven.” Such persistent irrationality wears out the speaker’s patience, and, exasperated, he finally asserts, “But they are dead; those two are dead!” His blunt words are lost on the girl, however, and she says once again, “Nay, we are seven!”
A pioneering work of English literary Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads was published again in 1800 and in 1802. These later editions included a new preface by Wordsworth that explained the guiding philosophy of the collection and became a manifesto of the Romantic age. Wordsworth declares in the preface, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Moreover, he maintains that poetry should reflect everyday language and speak to and for everybody – not just the cultured elite – because everybody has “powerful feelings.” At its core, Romanticism privileges feelings and emotions over logic and reason, as does the young girl in “We Are Seven.”
The Romantic poets also celebrated nature as a source of inspiration for powerful emotions, and many scholars see proto-ecological ideas in their works. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had made inroads across England, often altering natural, age-old landscapes. Literary scholar Katey Castellano writes, “Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions […] technological progressivism” while espousing a deep connection between humans and nature.
In “We Are Seven,” the girl, invested as she is with a “woodland air,” can be read as signifying not just nature, but a pre-industrial culture in which families remained together, rooted in their birthplace (as opposed to relocating to another city like “Conway”). Voicing the interests of modernity, the speaker urges the girl to relinquish those family ties that, from his perspective, are severed by death. The girl cannot accept his reasoning, because she senses the basic interdependence between human life and nature, which, in turn, expands her concept of her family circle. Although the girl’s siblings no longer breathe or run, the green on their graves assures her that they’re still rooted in their native soil and still participating in the living world just “steps” from her cottage.
Consisting of seventeen stanzas, “We Are Seven” begins with the speaker’s reflections on the vitality and simplicity of childhood and his rhetorical question, “What should it know of death?”
The second stanza introduces an eight-year-old girl, with whom the speaker has a chance encounter. His observations that the girl “had a rustic, woodland air” and “was wildly clad” use imagery that identifies the girl with nature and the lower social classes. The speaker ends his description of the girl with the declaration, “Her beauty made me glad.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker and the girl begin their exchange. The speaker asks how many brothers and sisters she has, and the girl replies, “Seven are we.” As the girl is alone, the speaker continues his line of questioning and asks about her six siblings: “Where are they, I pray you tell?” When the girl explains that two are sea voyagers, two live in the Welsh town of Conway, and two are lying in the churchyard beside the cottage she shares with her mother, her calculations confuse the speaker. Remarking on the vital difference between the girl, who can “run about,” and the two children entombed in graves, the speaker dismisses the latter from the equation. He concludes, “Then ye are only five.”
However, the girl counters his logic. She argues that her siblings’ “graves are green,” which is a sign of life, and “they may be seen,” which is evidence of existence. Moreover, as the two buried children lie just steps from her cottage door, the girl spends much of her time with them. She sits beside them while she knits or sews, and sometimes she sings to them. She often eats her supper with them. Indeed, her graveyard siblings are present for many of her daily activities, unlike her living siblings, who have moved away.
In the thirteenth stanza, the girl explains why her brother and sister are lying in the churchyard. Her sister, “little Jane,” fell ill. Because she was lying in bed, moaning, God set Jane free from her pain. “Then she went away” to lie peacefully in the churchyard.
That summer, the girl and her brother, John, played together around little Jane’s grave. When winter arrived, turning the ground “white with snow,” the girl “could run and slide.” John, however, “was forced to go” lie in the ground beside Jane. Despite the fact that her brother and sister are no longer active, the girl reasons that they’re still within reach – “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door” – and remain part of her family.
As the girl has just acknowledged that God intervened in the lives of her brother and sister, the speaker tries a third time to make her see her counting error and correct it. He asks again, “How many are you then, […] if two are in Heaven?” She stubbornly repeats, “We are seven.” Such persistent irrationality wears out the speaker’s patience, and, exasperated, he finally asserts, “But they are dead; those two are dead!” His blunt words are lost on the girl, however, and she says once again, “Nay, we are seven!”
A pioneering work of English literary Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads was published again in 1800 and in 1802. These later editions included a new preface by Wordsworth that explained the guiding philosophy of the collection and became a manifesto of the Romantic age. Wordsworth declares in the preface, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Moreover, he maintains that poetry should reflect everyday language and speak to and for everybody – not just the cultured elite – because everybody has “powerful feelings.” At its core, Romanticism privileges feelings and emotions over logic and reason, as does the young girl in “We Are Seven.”
The Romantic poets also celebrated nature as a source of inspiration for powerful emotions, and many scholars see proto-ecological ideas in their works. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had made inroads across England, often altering natural, age-old landscapes. Literary scholar Katey Castellano writes, “Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions […] technological progressivism” while espousing a deep connection between humans and nature.
In “We Are Seven,” the girl, invested as she is with a “woodland air,” can be read as signifying not just nature, but a pre-industrial culture in which families remained together, rooted in their birthplace (as opposed to relocating to another city like “Conway”). Voicing the interests of modernity, the speaker urges the girl to relinquish those family ties that, from his perspective, are severed by death. The girl cannot accept his reasoning, because she senses the basic interdependence between human life and nature, which, in turn, expands her concept of her family circle. Although the girl’s siblings no longer breathe or run, the green on their graves assures her that they’re still rooted in their native soil and still participating in the living world just “steps” from her cottage.