We Are Seven

Wordsworth wrote often about children. In addition to “We Are Seven,” there are a number of poems in Lyrical Ballads that feature children. These include the five short Lucy poems, about a beloved girl who has died. In “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the speaker celebrates her as a beautiful, almost unearthly creature: “She seem’d a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years” (Wordworth, William. “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal.” Poetry Foundation, 1800). The poem “Anecdote for Fathers,” like “We Are Seven” consists of an interaction between an adult and a child, in this case a father and his son. In “The Idiot Boy,” a boy with cognitive disabilities gets lost at night but there is a lot more to him than anyone realizes, such as his ability to interact joyfully with the environment. Wordsworth also wrote, in his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1850), about his own childhood in the Lake District as a time of joy and wonder in the experience of nature. 

 Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads that “We Are Seven” shows “the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of

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