" Theme of A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem that was written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and first published in volume II of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.
It is part of a series of poems written about an mysterious woman named Lucy who was believed to be his one of the loved ones , whom scholars have not been able to identify and are not sure whether she was real or fictional.
From October 1798, Wordsworth worked on the drafts for his "Lucy poems", which included "Strange fits of passion have I known", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" and "A slumber".
[4] The poem begins: The second stanza maintains the quiet, even tone of the first, but serves to undermine the former's sense of the eternal by revealing that Lucy has, by the time of composition, died.
[5] The beginning of the poem, according to Wordsworth biographer Mary Moorman, depicts a "creative sleep of the senses when the 'soul' and imagination are most alive.
[8] Boris Ford argues that within the second stanza as "the dead girl is now at last secure beyond question, in inanimate community with the earth's natural fixtures.
"[15] John Mahoney, in 1997, emphasises the poem's "brilliant alliteration of the opening lines" along with pointing out that "the utter simplicity masks the profundity of feeling; the delicate naturalness of language hides the range of implication".
Thus the use of the near-scientific word 'diurnal' achieves astonishing power, bringing a cosmic dimension to the girl's death and demonstrating Wordsworth's mastery of both the majestic and the mundane in his poetry.