Scarcity by gift

horizons of the "Lucy" poems

pp. 93-105

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Geoffrey Hartman, often returning to the "Lucy" poems to take further soundings of the work of reading generally, characterizes the cycle as "a group of short lyrics on the death of a young girl… [evoking] three highly charged themes: incompleteness, mourning, and memory."¹ Without offering an entirely fresh reading of these poems, I will reflect on them in the light of this "incompleteness' considered as a horizon for both loss and dedication. Incompleteness (equally invoking mourning and memory) lies on the cusp of literary and theological approaches to these elusively minimal poems. The incompleteness is not confined to Lucy's premature death but touches the theme of a "relation of scarcity" within the juncture of human and natural life, which I have already explored in relation to The Ruined Cottage, a text completed earlier in the same year (1798), in which Wordsworth embarked on the first of what we now know as the "Lucy" poems.²