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The speaker proclaims that he has been the victim of “strange fits of passion”; he says that he will describe one of these fits, but only if he can speak it “in the Lover’s ear alone.” Lucy, the girl he loved, was beautiful—“fresh as a rose in June”—and he traveled to her cottage one night beneath the moon. He stared at the moon as his horse neared the paths to Lucy’s cottage. As they reached the orchard, the moon had begun to sink, nearing the point at which it would appear to the speaker to touch Lucy’s house in the distance. As the horse plodded on, the speaker continued to stare at the moon. All at once, it dropped “behind the cottage roof.” Suddenly, the speaker was overcome with a strange and passionate thought, and cried out to himself: “O mercy! If Lucy should be dead!”
The stanzas of “Strange fits of passion have I known” fit an old, very simple ballad form, employed by Wordsworth to great effect as part of his project to render common speech and common stories in poems of simple rhythmic beauty. Each stanza is four lines long, each has alternating rhymed lines (an ABAB rhyme scheme), and each has alternating metrical lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, respectively—which means that the first and third lines of the stanza have four accented syllables, and the second and fourth lines have only three.
This direct, unadorned lyric is one of the most striking
and effective of the many simple lyrics like it, written by Wordsworth
in the mid to late
Also like a storyteller, Wordsworth builds suspense leading up to the climax of his poem by tying his speaker’s reverie to two inexorable forces: the slowly sinking moon, and the slowly plodding horse, which travels “hoof after hoof,” just as the moon comes “near, and nearer still” to the house where Lucy lies. The recitation of the objects of the familiar landscape through which the speaker travels—the paths he loves, the orchard-plot, the roof of the house—heightens the unfamiliarity of the “strange fit of passion” into which the speaker is plunged by the setting moon.
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