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William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems have enjoyed enduring popularity for a long time. And yet critics have struggled to reach a consensus on how to read this series of poems. In this essay, I propose to read these enigmatic poems through the lens of the Wordsworthian sublime and explore the possibility of reading them as Wordsworth’s poetic experiment in line with his larger poetic experiments in Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802). To achieve this goal, I first consider various conceptualizations of the sublime in the contemporary writings of Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Then, I read the “Lucy” poems, specifically “Strange fits of passion I have known,” “She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways,” and “A slumber did my spirit seal” to demonstrate Wordsworth’s endeavors to evoke the feeling of the sublime within ordinary situations and plain language. Building on Burke and Coleridge’s theories of the psychological sublime, Wordsworth generates an affect akin to the feeling of the sublime—a sense of mystery, wonder, and awe in the face of the ungraspable, the incomprehensible, and the vast scale of time, space, and mind—in this series of seemingly personal and subjective poems. Through the ghostliness of Lucy, mismatches of feelings and incidents, the absurd associations between thoughts, and the invocation of unexpected vastness in everyday language, Wordsworth creates the feeling of the sublime in the small world of “Lucy” poems. By understanding “Lucy” poems as Wordsworth’s experiment with the concept of the sublime, this essay aims not only to improve our understanding of these puzzling poems but also to expand the concept of the sublime in the Romantic era.
