that Lucy has neither now – ‘She neither hears nor sees’ – and uses three negatives, ‘no’, ‘no’ and ‘neither’ to further stress her death. This sense of inertia contrasts with the movement of the next two lines, where Lucy, buried in the ground, revolves around the sun daily, just as the earth does. The repetition of earthly and earth helps to convey Lucy’s return to nature: ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,/ With rocks, and stones, and trees.’ Even in death, nature impacts upon us. Lucy may not have ‘motion’ or ‘force’, but the earth does. The alliteration of ‘rolled’ and ‘round’ gives us a sense of the earth’s power. Wordsworth saw death not as an ending, but as the taking on of another form. Although you would be buried in the earth, you would still be listening to all the sounds and movements of nature going on around you, while being gently carried by the earth as it revolves slowly around the sun. So, even though it is sad that Lucy has died, there is also a sense of peace, because she has returned to nature and will still exist as part of nature.
This poem could also be interpreted as simply being a dream where the speaker has fallen asleep and dreamed of a young girl who he could not imagine ever ageing and growing old, but then she died suddenly and unexpectedly.
