The Day Dream Part VI The Departure - Analysis

A departure that feels like waking into the same world

The poem treats leaving not as loss but as a kind of enlarged waking: the princess goes far across the hills with her lover, stepping into that new world which is the old. That paradox is the poem’s central pressure point. What’s new is not the landscape but the way it’s inhabited—after enchantment, after sleep, after separation. The repeated movement beyond their utmost purple rim makes the horizon feel endlessly receding, as if love keeps creating more world to walk into.

Touch and motion: the body as proof

The first stanza is almost entirely physical: she leant on his arm, she feels it fold around her waist, and she follows. The tone is tender and certain—The happy princess follow’d him—yet the happiness is active, not settled. The poem insists that this departure is grounded in touch, in being held while moving forward, so the romance doesn’t float away into abstraction. Even the distance—far away, deep into the dying day—feels like an extension of the embrace.

Time dilates: from a hundred years to dawn

The lovers’ dialogue turns time into something negotiable. She says she would sleep another hundred years for such another kiss, as if love can make even absence worthwhile; he answers with a counter-command, O wake for ever, pushing against the temptation to retreat back into dream. Around them, the sky performs their argument: sliding star and merry wind, then twilight melted into morn. The shift from dusk to morning isn’t just scenery—it’s the poem siding, briefly, with his desire for permanent waking.

The darker turn: waking that could wake the dead

In the next stanza, the language intensifies into near-excess: O love, thy kiss would wake the dead! That hyperbole carries a faint unease, as if the poem recognizes how absolute this awakening claim is. The atmosphere answers with its own turn: instead of melting into dawn, the twilight died into the dark. The repetition of happy—happy sleep, happy kiss—starts to sound like an incantation meant to keep doubt away. Even the delicate image of a crescent-bark buoyed on vapour suggests they’re traveling on something thin and luminous, sustained by forces you can’t quite hold.

A hundred summers!: wonder versus disorientation

The princess’s startled question—A hundred summers! can it be?—brings the tension into focus: she is joyful, but she is also trying to orient herself in time. The lover doesn’t explain; he redirects, asking her to seek my father’s court, promising greater wonders there. It’s an invitation and a demand: to trade the private miracle of the kiss for a larger, public realm of marvels. The final sweep—Beyond the night across the day, Thro’ all the world she follow’d him—makes following feel both ecstatic and total, as if her new life is defined by motion toward his origin.

The poem’s quiet question: what must be left behind to keep waking?

If this is a fairy-tale ending, it’s an ending that refuses to rest. The princess keeps choosing forward movement, yet her wish to sleep another hundred years lingers like a shadow beside the command to wake for ever. The poem’s romance is bright, but it is also relentless: the horizon keeps sliding outward, and the promised greater wonders require that the intimacy of the moment become only the beginning.