Having read this week’s essays before the poems, I was
pleased to find so many connections between Hazlitt’s subject matter and
Wordsworth’s themes. In “We Are Seven,” Wordsworth explores absence from a
child’s perspective and speaks of death as if it is a temporary affliction that
has not brought an end to her siblings’ existences. She has fallen into the
trap described by Hazlitt in his essay on immortality; she does not accept that
death takes people away from the world and renders them “the prey of worms.”
Her insistence that her two deceased siblings are still very much part of the
family certainly embodies Hazlitt’s claim that youths “(think) nothing can
remove or obliterate them.
Similarly, Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey” exemplifies the ideas discussed in Hazlitt’s essay on distant
objects. In this essay he praises the power of the senses to bring back to
people their fondest memories, focusing on scents, sounds, tastes, and touches
over visualizations. Throughout Wordsworth’s poem, the speaker recalls a set of
distant memories using the language of these senses. Before the first two lines
have passed he hears the murmuring of the waters, a sound that allows him to “Once
again … behold these steep and lofty cliffs.” The stimulation of memory through
sensations other than sight is certainly highlighted in this work--perhaps well enough to have even inspired parts of Hazlitt's essay.
I think you make an interesting point regarding Hazlitt's essay in relation to the young girl in Wordsworth's poem "we are seven". I agree that there certainly exists a dichotomy between understanding the realities of death and believing in immortality. It begs the question, however, whether the young girl is in fact teaching the speaker in Wordsworth's poem a lesson on the importance of death. In class we discussed the possibility that the physical aspect of being and the presence of memory are two differing things. Though the girl's siblings' bodies have left the earth, and are memorialized by headstones in the churchyard, their spirits live on through memory. Thus, the little girl challenges the reader and the speaker to question the importance of physicality when preserving the memory of another.
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