22 pages • 44 minutes read
William WordsworthWe Are Seven
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Death
Death is a constantly recurring motif. It is announced in the first stanza, albeit with some irony. The adult, describing the “simple” (Line 1) child, asks, “What should it know of death?” (Line 4). It turns out that the child, although only eight years old, already has encountered death twice. Not only that, she has an understanding of death that is quite different from that of the adult, and one which he cannot grasp. The poem centers on the incontrovertible fact that two of the girl’s siblings have died. The process of dying is described in the stanza devoted to the suffering of the girl’s sister, Jane. The little girl also mentions the graves, which are covered by grass. She mentions God, and the adult mentions heaven, both in connection with death, and the narrator’s final words emphatically convey what to him is an unarguable truth: “But they are dead; those two are dead!” (Line 65). Apart from the first stanza, this is only the second time that the word “death,” “dead,” or “died” is used; for the most part the girl employs euphemisms, such as “in the churchyard lie” (Line 21), but the specter of death is nonetheless present throughout.
Counting and Arithmetic
Arithmetic is about the manipulation of numbers, including addition and subtraction. Counting is the process of calculating the total number of objects in a group, in this case the number of children in a family. Counting and simple arithmetic are fundamental to the poem. However, the counting strategies of the poem’s two characters are quite different. In Stanzas 5 and 6, the girl counts the number of her siblings, but in the process, she also identifies them, gives them small narratives, and personalizes them for the speaker: two live at Conway, two have gone to sea, and Jane and John lie in the churchyard. They, plus the girl, who still lives at home with her mother, add up to seven.
The narrator sees it differently. In Stanza 9, he does some arithmetic of his own: “If two are in the churchyard laid, / Then ye are only five” (Lines 35-36). For him, there is no sense in learning her siblings’ names or life stories; all that matters is how many there are currently in the house and elsewhere in the world. Thus, while the girl may have started out with seven siblings, she must now subtract the two who have died, arriving at five. This approach is only about the cold logic of numbers.
The different sums of adult and child arithmetic reveal the great gulf that separates their respective understandings of what constitutes life and death.
Child Mortality
The matter-of-fact references to the deaths of two of the little girl’s siblings point to the high child mortality rates in Britain during the 18th century. Wordsworth devotes an entire stanza to Jane’s illness: “In bed she moaning lay, / Till God released her of her pain; / And then she went away (Lines 50-52). John had a similar fate, although it is not described in such detail.
According to Statista, in 1800 in Britain, nearly one child in three died before the age of five. Wordsworth lost his own young daughter Catherine at the age of four in 1812 and his six-year-old son Thomas in the same year. Diseases that killed children included smallpox, measles, whooping cough, influenza, and pneumonia, as well as complications in childbirth.
Child mortality rates in cities were higher than in rural areas. Deaths were also higher amongst the poor. Families were generally large to guarantee that at least some children survived to adulthood. However, the poem alludes to other dangers: The two brothers who have gone to sea have entered a perilous occupation; sailors risked diseases such as scurvy, injuries from accidents, drowning, and the possibility of death in battle.
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