Summary
Stanza 1: The speaker recounts in a somber yet lucid tone how his spirit had been in a dreamlike state, sealed off from reality as if it were asleep. During this time, he did not fear anything in the way a person normally would—insinuating that he had no worries about his beloved. He goes on to explain that he did not feel any fear as his beloved seemed to be ageless and therefore immortal.
Stanza 2: In a calm and somber tone, the speaker reveals Lucy’s present condition. He describes how she no longer possesses the vitality portrayed in earlier poems. She no longer has any senses, and she has no life force whatsoever. She has now returned to nature; she is aging with the rocks, stones, and trees and has become one of them.
Analysis
As the last poem in the "Lucy" cycle, this poem has an elegiac tone and feels like a kind of requiem. The speaker has acknowledged that Lucy is indeed gone, and he explains his ignorance about the fact of her mortality by stating that his spirit was sealed off from reality. He was so enchanted by his beloved Lucy that he seemed to live in an alternate reality where she lived in eternal happiness on this earth. Her early passing has thus woken him up from this sleep, giving him a jolt of painful reality. The mention of “earthly years” indicates that the speaker somehow regarded Lucy as supernatural. He truly believed that time did not affect her—she was more heavenly than earthly, untouched and unaffected by any mortal concept of time. Ironically, this heavenly quality also meant that she was indeed mortal—he was right to think that she was not of this earth, but sadly this also meant that eventually, she belonged to the next world.
The speaker has a calm and decisive tone in the second stanza. There is none of the excessive sentiment that we find in the earlier poems of the cycle. The speaker understands fully that Lucy is gone, but one can feel that he is still stunned and saddened by this fact. His succinct words imply these feelings. In sharp contrast to the vibrant Lucy of the earlier poems, Lucy is now depicted as lifeless. She has no energy left in her. She cannot hear the whispers she once heard in the running water or see the stunning natural landscape where she once lived. The third line of the stanza depicts her as part of the very earth she once inhabited. She is “rolled” into the earth, just as other dead creatures are. The mention of the planet’s “diurnal course” also indicates that she was subject to the passage of time like all other creatures. She was not ageless after all, for time eventually passed and marked the end of her life. Interestingly, the speaker no longer compares Lucy to fragile natural elements such as flowers or animals. While plants and animals decompose, rocks, stones, and trees—despite being subject to the passage of time—do not age or die in the same manner. Thus, by stating that she is now in the company of rocks, stones, and trees, the speaker is suggesting that she has now cemented her place in the earth and has become a permanent part of it. She may be gone, but she is now eternally part of nature.
