Daniel Rowe
April 13, 2016
Death Through the Eyes of a Child
In We Are Seven, William Wordsworth explores fundamentally opposed views
on life and death through a seemingly ordinary conversation between a man and a
young girl. This poem is an exploration of the deep and thought provoking topics
that Wordsworth liked to ponder late into the night. Written in his classic ballad
format, the story of a young girl and her family is told through the questions of a
stranger. The often abbreviated saying goes “with age comes wisdom, but sometimes
age comes alone.” Wordsworth provides an interesting example of this, by
comparing the man’s closed-minded views on death to the young girl’s confident
outlook on what it means to be alive.
As the ballad progresses from start to finish, we see the narrator go from
being a nice older man that is just asking a child how many siblings she has, to a
spiteful, narrow-minded man who emphatically disputes the topic of death with an
eight year old girl. The man believes that death is the absolute end of everything. He
cannot even comprehend how the young girl could include two dead siblings in her
response to his query. The ninth stanza perfectly describes how the man classifies
life. He says,
“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”
Though he acknowledges that there were once seven siblings, the deaths of Jane and
John were absolute. To him, life is only what he can see with his own eyes and what
he can do with his own hands. This man sees death through defeated eyes.
In drastic opposition to the man, the young girl views death through endless
optimism. Through the entire length of Wordsworth’s poem, the girl does not show
even a single glimpse of uncertainty or doubt. Not even when she is confronted by a
man who should be much more experienced in the dealings of life and death. While
this seemingly blind optimism could be attributed to her young age and naivety,
there is much more at play than first meets the eye. This young girl, at the age of
eight, is still pure. She is untainted and completely unaffected by the dark cloud that
seems to hang over the man. That is not to say that she is not affected by the deaths
