For this discussion, I decided to write about Wordsworth’s “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” since we will be having a presentation in class on Monday about this poem. I thought that this poem was very interesting and at first had difficulty understanding the meaning of the piece.
I really like Wordsworth’s use of nature imagery and of Nature as a person in this poem. As I read this piece, I heard the words of a father talking about the adoration he had for his three year old little girl and the hopes of the future he had for her and taking care of her and watching her grow up. The beginning gives some foreshadowing that Nature also sees the beauty of this child and wants to raise her as it’s own. But the father goes on to describe how the daughter will be led by both impulse and law and that she will experience many different things. Even in places as different as “rock and plain” or “earth and heaven” or “glade and bower” she “shall feel an overseeing power, to kindle or restrain.” It seems like he is encouraging the child to be wild and calm and live life to the fullest, see different things and experience all that she can. He goes on to say that she will be “sportive as the fawn” running around the grass playing and climbing mountains. On the other side of things he also says that “hes shall be the breathing balm, and hers the silence and the calm, of mute insensate things” which means that will have a balance of wild and fun and also bein quiet and calm and peaceful. She will be everything and anything that she wants to be and all of the properties and beauty of nature will be hers. She will be free to explore and live and be whatever and whoever she wants to be. The father says how the daughter, Lucy, will see grace in everything, she will float through her life changing things as she goes. Things will bend to her because of her beauty and how charming and wonderful she is. He talks of how she will know all that there is to know and how there are so many things he wants to teach her and tell her of life. He is so happy about his little girl and living their happy life together. At the end of the poem, however, you find out that the “race is run” and that death has taken Lucy. She lives now in Nature and can stay with her father in differernt aspects of the world around him and his memories of her. I just thought that this was a very touching poem and I hope that what I got out of it is correct.
