Missing Time for Wordsworth

A poet's use of line breaks is often a deliberate construction used to signify an important meaning within the greater theme of the text as a whole. In William Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal", the author uses this construction. One may often think that a poem so brief in length could not contain much significant meaning, yet Wordsworth tells a beautiful and tragic love story spanning a unknown number of years in eight simple lines.

It is in the lack on concrete detail that Wordsworth tells the greatest story in this poem. Beginning his poem from perspective of a smitten lover, Wordsworth shows a narrator fascinated by his lover, thinking she can never age or die. He writes, "She seem'd a thing that could not feel/The touch of earthly years" (Lines 3-4). So immortal did she seem that death never crossed the speaker's mind. Impervious to age, a shock comes in the next stanza when the audience learns that she dies. Moving from eternity to morality by a pause that offers no information is how Wordsworth constructs this poem.

Wordsworth opens the second and final stanza with, "No motion has she now, no force/She neither hears nor sees" (Lines 5-6). This jump is certainly an abrupt one considering the fact that just a blank space before, the beloved was not only alive, but unaffected by death. Yet, as stated above, it is  truly in this gap that Wordsworth builds the tragedy of this tale. One cannot know what surpassed in the missing time, so the possibilities are infinite.

The structure that Wordsworth utilizes offers an analysis that a more traditional ballad structure cannot. Here, the absence of story creates the possibility for numerous other ones. Instead of spinning a traditional tragedy spanning decades that many other of his contemporaries might have done, Wordsworth instead writes a simple poem packed with beautiful meaning and despair. Having a narrator separated from the fears of natural humans who is in love with a woman he views as immortal, only to have reality come crashing onto them both is a tale that one would think must take place in more than eight lines of poetry. There lies the genius of Wordsworth's writing and what sets this poem apart from many others in this period.