Lucy Poems 2 - Analysis

Love of England Discovered by Leaving It

The poem’s central claim is bluntly paradoxical: the speaker learns his love for England only by traveling among unknown men beyond the sea. Distance becomes a measuring tool. The address England! sounds like a sudden confession, as if the country is not an idea but a person he can speak to directly. What changes him is not a new place so much as the feeling of being unplaced—among strangers, he finally senses what home had been supplying all along.

The first stanza is almost austere in its language, which makes its emotional admission sharper: did I know till then suggests he lacked even the vocabulary for this attachment before exile gave it shape. The love he “bore” is something carried, maybe without noticing its weight.

The End of the Melancholy Dream

In the second stanza, the poem pivots from discovery to vow. The speaker declares, 'Tis past, dismissing the earlier period as a melancholy dream, and promises he will not quit thy shore again. The tone turns steadier, even slightly defensive, as if he’s arguing himself into permanence. The repetition of intensification—more and more—doesn’t just communicate growing affection; it hints at anxiety. If love keeps increasing, it may be trying to outrun something darker that also grows in memory.

Mountains and Desire, Hearth and Work

The third stanza tightens England into two intimate zones: the vast and the domestic. Among thy mountains the speaker feels the joy of my desire, a phrase that makes longing sound wholesome, almost sanctioned by the landscape. But that mountain joy is immediately paired with a small, homely motion: she I cherished turned her wheel beside an English fire. The spinning wheel by the hearth is not romantic spectacle; it is routine, warmth, labor.

This is the hinge of the poem. What began as national feeling suddenly reveals a private center: England matters because a particular “she” lived there, worked there, and was cherished there. The country is becoming inseparable from a person.

Lucy as a Landscape-Memory

The final stanza names that person: Lucy. With that name, the poem’s patriotism is recast as elegy. England’s mornings and nights don’t just mark time; they act like keepers of visibility—showed and concealed the places where Lucy played. The language makes the land complicit in remembering and in hiding, as if nature alternately offers Lucy back to him and then takes her away.

The closing claim is quietly devastating: the last green field Lucy saw belongs to England. What looks like a patriotic possessive—thine—is also a claim of custody over the dead. England is the final witness, the final container for Lucy’s sight.

The Poem’s Core Tension: Country as Comfort, Country as Tomb

One contradiction animates the whole lyric: England is both the source of joy and the site of loss. The speaker insists he will never leave again, yet the deepest reason for staying is that leaving would mean leaving Lucy’s last places behind—her bowers, her green field. Love of country therefore isn’t purely celebratory; it’s bound to the need to remain near a grief that can’t be resolved. The tone, which begins like a travel recollection, ends like a private memorial, with the landscape doing the work of a gravestone.

A Sharp Question the Ending Forces

If England is loved because Lucy is folded into it, what happens to England when Lucy is gone? The final possessives—thine too, That Lucy's eyes—suggest the speaker is giving the country his devotion in exchange for one thing: that it keep her present to him, at least as a remembered field, a morning light, a concealed bower.