It describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and a "little cottage girl" about the number of brothers and sisters who dwell with her.
This solitude with nature he claimed encouraged him to reach a deeper understanding where the experience was no longer just for pleasure, as it was in his earlier days, but also hinted at a darker side.
"[7] The poem is a dialogue between a narrator who serves as a questioner and a little girl, with part of the evolving first stanza contributed by Coleridge.
[11] More recent scholarship, however, focuses on the sociological context for the poem, written the same year that Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population was published.
[13][14][15] Like Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village", Robbins argues, Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" "promotes a traditional link between individuals and the place they were born.
"[16] Peter DeBolla argues that the poem is irresolvable partly because of the math in the poem—the evenhanded tension between even and odd.
[17] Maureen McLane reads the poem in the context of moral philosophy and argues that while the girl and the questioner speak the same language, they have wholly different views about time, death, and counting.
[18] John Mahoney argues, "The seemingly silly squabble between adult and child is already a revelation of the early and continuing tension in the poet between the hope for a perpetual bliss and the incursion of a harsh reality.