She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways

While Wordsworth’s essay “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads” suggests he drew the poems he wrote from life, it is important to remember that he also was influenced by the English poetry, folklore, and village stories that came before him. Written in 1798, “Lucy Gray,” for instance, uses the ballad form to retell a local legend about a girl who’d disappears during a snowstorm and becomes a near-ghost. In a similar way, the Lucy poems rely on a combination of reality and myth-making, particularly “She dwelt among the untrodden ways.”

The fact that Wordsworth never identified Lucy with a biographical counterpart adds to the poems’ mystery and positions the figure at their center as a symbol of lost love and innocence. To amplify this effect, Wordsworth deliberately cut specificity from his original version for publication, creating more ambiguity. In the 1798 draft, a cut initial stanza reads:

My hope was one, from cities far,

Nursed on a lonesome heath;

Her lips were red as roses are,

Her hair a woodbine wreath (Matlak, Richard E. “Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1978).

The focus is on the speaker’s hope and distance from Lucy—the speaker lives in “cities far” (Matlak). The stanza also hints at Lucy’s physical appearance, which is compared to natural elements like “roses” and a “woodbine wreath” (Matlak). Here, we see a speaker who longs to escape their urban environment and find comfort with Lucy’s quieter, nature-inflected life. By excising the original first stanza in the final version of the poem, Wordsworth draws focus away from the speaker and closer to the character of Lucy, who is also made more mythic by the capitalization of the word “Maid” (Line 3) and the slightly archaic word “dwelt” (Line 1), with which Wordsworth replaced the more prosaic “lived” of the draft. Lucy thus becomes the center of the narrative, which heightens the poignancy of the last lines: “But she is in her grave, and oh, / The difference to me!” (Lines 11-12).

The first stanza situates Lucy in the countryside: “She dwelt among the untrodden ways / Beside the springs of Dove” (Lines 1-2). Lucy lives away from most people and civilization, near the River Dove. The land around her appears uncultivated—the roads are “untrodden,” which means that not only have they not been paved, but they also don’t bear the markings of foot traffic. Like the “Springs” (Line 2)—pools of water that come up from an indeterminate underground source—Lucy is hidden but beautifies and nourishes the world in an almost magical way.

Lucy’s complete isolation is emphasized further by the speaker’s explanation that she was “a Maid whom there were none to praise / And very few to love” (Lines 3-4). Lucy’s solitude is almost a Rousseau-like state of nature; she is apart from even family or society. The wistfulness of these phrases makes Lucy sound neglected—and indirectly elevates the aesthetic taste of the speaker, the only being who can perceive Lucy’s worthiness and love her correctly. Interestingly, the imposition of judgment onto Lucy’s existence seems to be completely external—only the speaker believes that she should be evaluated by an outside observer and “praised”—we do not ever learn whether Lucy herself wants to have someone assay her qualities in this way.

The second stanza further compares Lucy with her natural surroundings. Unlike the draft’s discarded stanza, these comparisons are more about the speaker’s distance than commentary about Lucy’s physical attributes. She is described as “[a] violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye!” (Lines 5-6). In Romantic fashion, Lucy is compared to one of the most common flowers in England. Again, the speaker insists that the value of the hidden is best judged by a skilled observer, someone capable of surveilling the almost missed, like the violet or Lucy herself. Neither flower nor young woman seems to want attention—only the speaker has decided that their near-invisibility is a negative thing. Not coincidentally, the ability to find the violet and Lucy hidden by the stone marks the speaker as particularly skilled at unearthing value—something of which the poem implies the speaker is proud. The theme of solitary existence is also the subject of the subsequent simile: “Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky” (Lines 7-8). Lucy glows despite being far from crowds who might judge beauty—but the speaker has determined that she is beautiful according to social dictates.

The 1798 draft contains another stanza cut from the final version:

And she was graceful as the broom

That flowers by Carron’s side;

But slow distemper checked her bloom,

And on the Heath she died (Matlak).

Scholars believe the reference to the River Carron alludes to the poem “Owen of Carron” (1778) by John Langhorne, one of Wordsworth’s favorite poets, which was in turn based on the Ancient English ballad, Gil Maurice, contained in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, one of the few books Wordsworth had in Germany. This draft stanza suggests a cause to Lucy’s death: the “slow distemper” implies illness; later cut lines suggest that society’s cruelty caused her to be depressed long before her death.

In the published version, Wordsworth replaces all of this with Stanza 3, in which the speaker simply records that Lucy “lived unknown, and few could know / when Lucy ceased to be” (Lines 9-10). This eliminates the outside world as a factor in her demise as neither society nor illness is the active catalyst for Lucy’s end. Instead, Lucy is a beauty most of the world has missed—and they simply do not care. Unseen, Lucy simply disappears. This helps to establish the emotional effect of the poem. By not dwelling on the actualities of her death, the speaker is able to discuss her beauty as special but transitory, and to hold up the experience of having been Lucy’s sole observer as a special privilege that results in special private suffering.

Keeping Lucy’s specific identity unknown—she is merely a neglected “Maid” (line 3) who lives “among the untrodden ways” (Line 1)—and giving no cause for her demise adds an ephemeral quality to her existence, like a memory or ghost. She may be “in her grave” (Line 11), “unknown” (Line 9) by the general populace, but the speaker is determined to correct this. The poem becomes the “mossy stone” (Line 5) that marks the spot where the “violet” (Line 5) had been; the speaker can “praise” (Line 3) Lucy as she deserved, making her unforgettable. In this way, the poem exists not just as tribute to grief but also to love.