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The Full Text of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
1A slumber did my spirit seal;
2I had no human fears:
3She seemed a thing that could not feel
4The touch of earthly years.
5No motion has she now, no force;
6She neither hears nor sees;
7Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
8With rocks, and stones, and trees.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Introduction
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William Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" first appeared in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), a groundbreaking collaborative poetry collection by Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" is the last poem in a short sequence known as the "Lucy poems," in which a speaker expresses his love for (and grief over) a mysterious, idealized woman. In this poem, the speaker marvels over the strangeness of his beloved's death: having always seen her as young and vibrant, he can hardly wrap his head around the fact that her body is now as inert as the "rocks, and stones, and trees." The poem reminds readers that most people live deep in a delusional "slumber," barely acknowledging mortality despite death's inevitability.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Summary
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A deep sleep closed up my soul. I wasn't afraid of anything people are usually afraid of (like death): my beloved seemed to me like someone who could never be changed by the passage of time.
My beloved is dead now, so she can't move—she has no strength or life force. She also can't hear or see. She just passively goes round and round with the earth's movement, spinning along with the rest of the inert natural world.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Themes
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Grief and Mortality
The speaker of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” looks back with wonder on a time when his now-dead beloved was alive. Back then, he reflects, he had no “human fears” of death, feeling that his beloved was somehow beyond “the touch of earthly years.” Now that she’s dead, that’s actually true—but not in the way he imagined it to be true. Rather than being an immortal, changeless goddess, his dead love has become an inert, passive, unchanging part of nature. Death, this poem suggests, is a perfectly simple and natural thing—but one that humans “seal” out, preferring to live in illusion. In this light, most of life is like a “slumber,” and grief is an awakening to the truth.
The speaker remembers his past life with his beloved as a kind of dream—a “slumber” he didn’t even know he was in. This “slumber” was so deep that it “seal[ed]” the speaker’s “spirit.” In other words, his soul was locked up safe, but also cut off from reality.
Specifically, this “slumber” protected the speaker from the thought of mortality. In his dreamworld, the speaker saw his beloved as “a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years”: eternally young and alive, someone death could never touch.
This image suggests that people tend to live in a sort of dream. Almost no one really goes about their day-to-day lives truly feeling that the people they love (and they themselves) will one day die. This slumber thus protects the speaker from pain, but he pays a price for that protection. Unable to accept that his beloved is mortal, he's setting himself up for a terrible shock.
After the speaker’s beloved dies, he seems to wake up, understanding that his belief in his beloved’s immortality was an illusion all along. Grief, this change suggests, forces humans to reckon with a reality they’d rather not face.
In the reality the speaker awakens to, his beloved is certainly past “the touch of earthly years,” but only because she’s become an object, just like the “rocks, and stones, and trees.” This natural imagery suggests that death is as normal as “earth’s diurnal course” (that is, the earth’s daily rotation).
In a twist, though, it’s exactly that normalcy that’s so bewildering. The speaker’s plain, factual statement of his beloved’s deadness—in contrast with his past dream of her—seems to ask: how could she really be dead? How could someone who seemed not to “feel / the touch of earthly years” be inert as a stone now?
Grief, in other words, shakes people awake from the “slumber” they seem to spend most of their lives in, forcing them to confront a simple but bewildering fact: death is at once the most normal and the most mysterious thing there is.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
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Lines 1-2
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:The poem opens with the first-person speaker looking back on his past and remembering a time when his life felt like a deep, impenetrable sleep—a sleep in which he was oblivious to danger. His "spirit" was in a dreamworld.
In just these first two lines, the reader might already get the sense that something is going to go wrong with this metaphorical "slumber." The past tense suggests that, while the speaker might once have fearlessly slumbered, he's awake now. And the language the speaker uses feels a little ominous and ambivalent. His slumber didn't, say, guard or embrace his spirit, but "seal[ed]" it, closing it tightly away and perhaps even imprisoning it.
The word "seal" might also suggest another kind of seal: a wax stamp imprinted with an insignia or initials, used to close letters in the days before envelopes. In other words, this "slumber" might not just have closed the speaker's spirit up, but stamped it with its own identity, possessing it. This would mean that the speaker was so deep in his sleep that his very soul seemed to belong to the dream-world.
Similarly, the idea of having "no human fears" might sound like a relief, but it's also a little sinister. If the speaker had "no human fears," he was safe, sure, but also distanced from his own humanity.
And though he seemingly had no idea he was asleep, dreams always come to an end.
The speaker communicates all this complex feeling in a remarkably straightforward way. This poem uses the simple ABAB rhyme scheme and the steady, pulsing common meter of a ballad (a traditional form based on folk songs). This means that the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter (four iambs, or four da-DUMs) and iambic trimeter (three da-DUMs).
The speaker builds a lot of sophistication into this simple template. Take a look, for instance, at the evocative way he uses end-stopped lines here:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:Those heavy closing punctuation marks suggest big, thoughtful pauses. These pauses, in turn, give the poem a pensive quality, making it seem like the speaker is reflecting deeply on his past. That colon in line 2 also feels expectant: the speaker is about to tell readers something more about his long-ago "slumber."
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Lines 3-4
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
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Lines 5-6
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees; -
Lines 7-8
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Symbols
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Rocks and Stones and Trees
The "rocks, and stones, and trees" mentioned in the poem's final line symbolize the stillness of death. In death, the speaker's beloved has now become as still and passive as these objects: she can't move, hear, or see any more than a stone can. Her soul is gone, and her body is just a thing among things.
But this image also provides a little hint of consolation. In becoming like "rocks, and stones, and trees," the dead beloved also becomes a part of the world—and trees, after all, are alive. Although death feels final and incomprehensible to this speaker, perhaps it's also an opportunity to become part of something bigger: nature itself.
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Sleep
The speaker's "slumber" is a symbol of the willful ignorance in which people often lead their lives. Day to day, the speaker suggests, most people don't really consider the reality of death, preferring instead to remain dreamily unconscious, "seal[ed]" away from the fact that everyone will eventually die. Inevitably, though, the grief of losing a loved one comes to wake up everyone who "slumbers," forcing them to finally confront mortality.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration gives "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" its musing, reflective tone, and draws attention to the contrast between the speaker's "slumber" and his awakened grief.
Strong sibilant alliteration appears in the very first line: "A slumber did my spirit seal." Repeated /s/ sounds often feel gentle and quiet; here, that quietness evokes the speaker's past life, when he metaphorically "slept" in blissful ignorance, with no "human fears" even crossing his mind.
Later, as the speaker tries to wrap his head around his beloved's death, the alliterative /r/ evokes not just a mood, but a landscape. The beloved's body, he says, is:
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.The rumbling /r/ sound recalls exactly what it describes: rocks rolling round. The repetition of the /r/ even suggests the constant cycling of "earth's diurnal course"—the globe's daily rotation. And the alliteration here connects to strong /r/ consonance, too: listen to all the internal /r/ sounds in "earth's diurnal course." These rough, insistent /r/ sounds contrast with the gentler /s/ alliteration in the first stanza, making it clear that the speaker has awakened to the hard reality of death.
A subtler alliterative sound here might go unnoticed in a longer poem—but in only eight lines, it catches the reader's attention. That's the repeated /f/ sound that connects "fears," "feel," and "force." While these words don't appear right next to each other, they're strong enough to stand out, and they link the poem's two stanzas together.
Each of these vivid words relates to something that's missing. In the first stanza, the speaker has no "fears," and imagines that his beloved can't "feel" the passing of time. In the second stanza, those illusions are gone, and the speaker has to reckon with the fact that his beloved now has "no force," no vitality. The emphatic /f/ sound thus tracks the speaker's transformation from a naïve young man to a grieving older one—and his beloved's transition from life to death.
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Assonance
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Caesura
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End-Stopped Line
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Polysyndeton
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Repetition
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Metaphor
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Slumber
- Seal
- Earth's Diurnal Course
Slumber-
A deep sleep.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
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Form
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" is built from two short stanzas, each a quatrain. It was first published in a collection known as Lyrical Ballads, so it should come as no surprise that it's a lyrical ballad—or, rather, a lyric poem that is also a ballad.
This means that it deals with an intense moment of emotion, but does so using the simple form of a folk song (a ballad). With its simple shape, its singsong ABAB rhyme scheme, and its common meter, the poem communicates a complex feeling—the strangeness and bewilderment of grief—in a form as plain as a nursery rhyme. (See the Rhyme Scheme and Meter sections for more on that.)
At the time that Wordsworth was writing, the idea of a "lyrical ballad" was wildly innovative. At the turn of the 19th century, lyric poetry tended to be high-flown and formal; ballads, on the other hand, were a common, popular form, usually used to tell stories—often bawdy stories. Here, though, Wordsworth uses the ballad form to explore the human experience rather than to simply tell a story. In doing so, he puts his tale of grief into plain language, ultimately suggesting that what he has to say about the human experience is true and relevant for everyone, not just the literary upper class.
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Meter
Like many of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" uses common meter—also known as ballad meter. That means that the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter (that is, lines of four iambs, metrical feet that go da-DUM) and iambic trimeter (lines that use three iambs).
Here's how that sounds in context:
Rolled round | in earth's | diur- | nal course,
With rocks, | and stones, | and trees.This steady unstressed-stressed rhythm is all part of Wordsworth's bigger poetic philosophy. He and his friend Coleridge were interested in folksy poetic forms like ballads, hymns, and nursery rhymes—all of which usually use common meter. (See the Form section for more on that.) Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that this simple, alternating meter could hold all kinds of complex feeling.
And so it does here. The iambic pulse of these lines sounds a lot like a heart—a heart that skips a beat every other line. Like the life of the speaker's beloved, the rhythm seems as if it could go on steadily forever—and then it stops short.
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Rhyme Scheme
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" uses a steady, consistent rhyme scheme. It runs like this:
ABAB CDCD
The simplicity of this pattern reflects the speaker's grief and confusion. Grappling with the mind-boggling fact that people can be alive one moment and dead the next, the speaker sticks to plain rhymes and plain language, as if trying to put his huge loss into a form he can hold onto.
This rhyme scheme also reflects Wordsworth's poetic approach. Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth rejected the formality of Enlightenment-era poetry in favor of basic folk forms like the ballad, which often uses an ABAB or ABCB rhyme scheme. The back-and-forth rhyme pattern here makes this poem feel straightforward and musical, even as it lyrically explores a profound human mystery.
The tension between this simple rhyme scheme and the poem's complex subject matter fits the speaker's conflicted outlook on death, illustrating that mortality is two contradictory things at once: the plainest fact there is, and a phenomenon way beyond human understanding.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Speaker
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The speaker of "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" doesn't reveal much about himself—not even his gender. (We're calling him "he" here because so much of Wordsworth's poetry was autobiographical.) In his anonymity, this speaker becomes a universal figure, facing a problem that every human has to deal with at one time or another: grief.
As this speaker mourns the death of his beloved, he reflects that he used to be in a metaphorical kind of sleep, believing that his loved one would never die. Now, though, he has to face the fact that she's as lifeless as a stone—a bitter awakening after his happy "slumber."
His simple language reflects how difficult it is for anyone to grasp mortality: it's as if he's trying to put an incomprehensible experience into words he can understand. How, he seems to ask, can someone go from being vibrantly alive one minute to unresponsive and motionless the next? Voicing this universal feeling, the speaker faces the mystery of death with plainspoken sorrow and wonder.
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“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Setting
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One might say that the setting of "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal is the whole world. The speaker doesn't set the poem in any single place. Instead, he imagines the "earth's diurnal course" (that is, its daily rotation) and the "rocks, and stones, and trees" that the spinning planet carries with it.
These big images suggest that the poem's themes are similarly huge. Everyone in the world, the poem seems to say, will have to confront mortality at one time or another—whether grieving over a loved one or facing their own deaths. Death is as essential and basic a feature of life as "rocks, and stones, and trees" are of the earth.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
Literary Context
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a founder of English Romanticism. In collaboration with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he revolutionized how the world thought about poetry.
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" was first printed in the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge's masterpiece, a collaborative collection called Lyrical Ballads. The first edition, which came out in 1798, shook the literary landscape. Using familiar forms like the ballad to muse on nature, magic, and human consciousness, Lyrical Ballads shocked readers raised on the Enlightenment-era elegance and wit of writers like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. The book was widely discussed, and the publication of a second edition only two years later reflects its popularity.
Wordsworth put himself in charge of this second edition, making many revisions and adding a sequence known as the "Lucy poems." "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" is that sequence's conclusion. These poems deal with a speaker's grief over a mysterious beloved.
There's no critical consensus about whether "Lucy" was based on a real person. But one theory is that these poems deal with Wordsworth's grief and frustration over his relationship with Coleridge. The two men, along with Wordsworth's brilliant sister Dorothy, shared a short period of intense creative inspiration. For a few magical years, they lived and worked closely together, going for long walks, discussing literature, and composing poetry.
But Wordsworth and Coleridge were very different. Wordsworth was disciplined, arrogant, and fully persuaded of his own genius; Coleridge was erratic, inspired, and insecure, prone to addictions and hopeless loves. After the pair's brief period of shared genius, they drifted apart: Wordsworth grew frustrated with Coleridge's moods and frenzies, and Coleridge was heartbroken by Wordsworth's rejection.
These tensions came to a head when Wordsworth published the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. By this time, Wordsworth was conscious of his status as a public poet—and of his and Coleridge's stylistic disagreements. He revised Lyrical Ballads to play down Coleridge's contributions, even taking Coleridge's name off the title page. This was the first in a long series of blows, disagreements, and misunderstandings that would erode the pair's friendship.
But the great collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge lives beyond "the touch of earthly years." Their work was a major inspiration to younger Romantic poets like John Keats and to future generations of writers. Wordsworth remains one of the best-known poets—some of his poems, like "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" are so famous that they're almost proverbial.
Historical Context
Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote Lyrical Ballads during a time of massive political and social upheaval. Besides the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, during which the English began to abandon traditional rural lifestyles to find employment in factories and cities, all of Europe was shaken in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
In this revolt, the French people overthrew their decadent monarchy and installed a republic in its place. Wordsworth, who had traveled extensively in France in the years leading up to the Revolution (and left an illegitimate daughter behind there), was at first a passionate supporter of the revolutionaries. He was, in his youth, a great believer in democracy; his use of the popular, lower-class ballad form speaks to his sense of universal human dignity.
But his fervor for the French cause cooled as the Republic fell into the Terror, a dark, paranoid, and bloody period in which the new government took to guillotining its opponents. By the time Wordsworth wrote "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal," the French Republic had become belligerent and territorial; under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte, its armies rampaged across Europe, bent on conquering.
Wordsworth's disappointment in the French Revolution led to his reactionary conservatism. In his later years, this former anti-monarchist was pleased to accept the title of Poet Laureate from Queen Victoria herself.
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More “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read out loud.
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The Wordsworth Trust — Visit the Wordsworth Trust's website for more on Wordsworth's life, poetry, and legacy.
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More on the Lyrical Ballads — Read about the second edition of Lyrical Ballads—the important collection in which this poem was first published—on the British Library's website.
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A Short Biography — Read a brief biography of Wordsworth from the Poetry Foundation, where you can find links to more of his poems.
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The Lucy Poems — Read a New Yorker essay that discusses what's so strange, novel, and important about Wordsworth's "Lucy poems."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth
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