Reading Lucy, Rereading Nature: An Ecological Approach to Wordsworth's Lucy Poems

Abstract

William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, a series of intriguing meditations on a mysterious female figure, are an indelible part of the Romantic canon. The scholarly fervour to discover Lucy’s real-life counterpart has often led critics to consider these works psychoanalytically or biographically. Rather than situate these works in such a context, my paper looks to see how we can consider the Lucy poems as ecological endeavours – specifically, to observe how Lucy is used to reread nature and develop a new understanding of the environment. Using the theories of Timothy Morton’s “The Mesh” as my foundation, I argue that Wordsworth’s Lucy poems are non-anthropocentric thought experiments that seek to decenter the human and further advocate the pantheism evident in his other nature poetry. Wordsworth accomplishes this by eroding several intellectual conventions: blurring the distinctions between life and non-life, human and animal; collapsing Lucy’s linearity of being; and considering the role of perception and mediation in environmental assessment. By eschewing traditionally dualistic modes of representation that privilege human experience, Wordsworth embraces mesh-like thinking. He creates a space for ontological perspectives that disrupt the human-centric mode and remind us of our inextricability from nature – instituting new possibilities in conceiving of both Romantic canonicity and our place in the biosphere.