She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways

While Wordsworth’s essay “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads” suggests he drew the poems he wrote from life, it is important to remember that he also was influenced by the English poetry, folklore, and village stories that came before him. Written in 1798, “Lucy Gray,” for instance, uses the ballad form to retell a local legend about a girl who’d disappears during a snowstorm and becomes a near-ghost. In a similar way, the Lucy poems rely on a combination of reality and myth-making, particularly “She dwelt among the untrodden ways.”

The fact that Wordsworth never identified Lucy with a biographical counterpart adds to the poems’ mystery and positions the figure at their center as a symbol of lost love and innocence. To amplify this effect, Wordsworth deliberately cut specificity from his original version for publication, creating more ambiguity. In the 1798 draft, a cut initial stanza reads:

My hope was one, from cities far,

Nursed on a lonesome heath;

Her lips were red as roses are,

Her hair a woodbine wreath (Matlak, Richard E. “Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1978).

The focus is on the speaker’s hope and distance from Lucy—the speaker lives in “cities far” (Matlak).