Wordsworth's Lyric, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"

If Wordsworth is giving the wish of letting the earth decreased slightly, his conversion of this epitaphic formula is so complete that to trace the process of conversion might seem gratuitous. The formula, a trite if deeply grounded figure itself, or better, the adjusted words of the mourner that lie slightly on the girl and everyone who is a mourner.I come back, then, to the "aesthetic" sense of a burden lifted rather than denied. A heavy element is made lighter. One may still feel that the term "elation" is inappropriate in this context; yet elation is, as a mood, the very subject of the first stanza. for the mood described is love or desire when it etemizes the loved person, when it makes her a star-like being that "could not feel/the touch of earthly years." this nave elation, this spontaneous movement of the spirit upward, is revered in the downturn or catastrophe of the second stanza. Yet this stanza does not close out the illusion; it preserves it within the elegiac fo
rm. The illusion is elated, in our use of the word: aufgehoben seems the proper touch, like a star, if the earth in its daily motion is a planetary and erring rather than a fixed star, and if all on this star of earth must partake of its sublunary, mortal, temporal nature.to sum up: in Wordsworth's lyric the specific gravity of words is weighed in the balance of each stanza; and this balance is as much a judgment on speech in the context of our mortality as it is a meaningful response to the individual death, at the limit of the medium of words, and close to silence, what has been purged is not concreteness, or the empirical sphere of the emotions - shock, disillusion, trauma, recognition, grief, atonement - what has been purged is a series of flashy schematisms and false or partial mediation: artificial plot, inflated consolatory rhetoric, the coercive absolutes of logic or faith.

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