William Wordsworth, from the preface of his piece Lyrical Ballads from 1800 and 1802, defines a few different things that are essential to poetry, including poetry itself. Besides poetry, Wordsworth also defines the use of common language versus poetic diction, the principal object of poetry, and the balance of metre and emotion in a poem. All of the themes that he defines and talks about in his piece are reflected in his poem titled Lucy Gray, which is also included in his collection Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (193). This means that there should be an emphasis of emotion in a poem, and that powerful feelings should not be written about in the moment it happens, but should be reflected on at a later moment, so that there is a recreation of a strong emotion in a poet’s reflection. In his poem Lucy Gray, it is obvious that the central purpose of the poem he has written is the emotion of the parents when they lost their daughter in a snowstorm. These emotions are exhibited through the lines, “And now they homeward run’d and cry’d/”In Heaven we shall meet!”/When in the snow the Mother spied/The print of Lucy’s feet” (196). This poem is based on a true story of a girl being lost in a snowstorm and dying, and, knowing this fact, it seems almost like an exploitation of the real parents’ pain for the fame of his own poetry. Whether this is the case or not, the poem definitely conveys and emphasizes a powerful emotion.

In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth says that he uses the language of the “common man” instead of poetic diction and elevated language because he wanted to connect with an audience of middle- to lower-class people and to make his poetry accessible to all people, not just the highly educated, and he wanted his poems to differ from the type of poetry that was popular during that time, which was mainly written with poetic diction. The poem Lucy Gray uses the common language of the time so that everyone at the time could understand it easily. Even in lines such as “with many a wanton stroke” and “snapp’d a faggot-band” (196), people of the early 1800’s would still understand it because words like “wanton” and “faggot-band” were commonly-used words. We easily understood the story of the poem and the emotions Wordsworth was trying to convey, and if we could understand it, then the common man of the early nineteenth century could, too.

Wordsworth, in the preface of Lyrical Ballads, says that there is a principal object of poetry. This principal object of his poems is to choose a situation from common life and describe it in language people can relate to, present things in unusual ways, and “make these situations interesting” (187) so people will want to read them. In Lucy Gray, Wordsworth takes a sad but fairly common situation of the time, the loss or disappearance of a child, and puts it into his poetry. By using a common situation that people could relate to and writing something creative about it makes the poem both interesting to read and relatable to his audience at the time.

Wordsworth tells us, in Lyrical Ballads, that “poetry depends on the metre” (192), but also that “the end of poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance in pleasure. Even though he said earlier that emotion plays a big role in poetry, this means that the metre helps keep the poems balanced, and not too over-emotional, so that people don’t get overwhelmed with the emotions the poems convey. While the purpose of the poem Lucy Gray is to convey the emotions of the loss of a child, the metre is consistent, with four lines per stanza and an ABAB rhyme pattern, where every first and third line rhymes and every second and fourth line rhymes as well. This makes the poem sound rhythmic, even ballad-like, which makes the poem less emotional to balance out the intense amount of emotions that comes with losing a child. Wordsworth’s poem Lucy Gray reflects all of the things he mentions and defines in the preface of his collection Lyrical Ballads. These things include the definition of poetry, the use of the language of the “common man” verses the elevated language of poetic diction, The principal object of poetry, and the balance between metre and emotion. Wordsworth’s style of poetry, and the things he chose to write about, made his poetry relatable to the people of the early 1800s.

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