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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

A Slumber did my Spirit Seal


              1A slumber did my spirit seal;
              2      I had no human fears:
              3She seemed a thing that could not feel
              4      The touch of earthly years.

              5No motion has she now, no force;
              6      She neither hears nor sees;
              7Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
              8      With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Notes

1] Composed in Germany. Coleridge wrote of this poem in a letter of April 1799: "Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph ... whether it had any reality, I cannot say.--Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die."


Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1800). No. 5, 1 (c.1,2), 2(c.1) (Victoria College Library, Toronto).
First publication date: 1800
RPO poem editor: J. R. MacGillivray
RP edition: 3RP 2.335.
Recent editing: 2:2002/3/20

Composition date: 1799
Composition date note: early 1799
Rhyme: abab


Other poems by William Wordsworth