Form & Content in "We Are Seven"

Wordsworth‘s poem “We Are Seven” evokes a number of different feelings- we feel sad that the little maid of eight years has lost her siblings, we might also feel sad at the fact that she cannot comprehend how tragic that fact is, and from that we feel surprised at how much ease she has when she speaks of them. By the end of the poem, though, I think a large part of us is left feeling very happy for this girl, and we are ultimately left admiring her ability to treat death not as something that tears her apart from her siblings but something that merely stops her from physically being able to see them. One might ask, is it simply her very immature state as an eight year old girl that is stopping her from seeing the sadness in the situation? At that age, we are very accepting of things we are told- of “the way the world works“, so to speak. For example, when I first asked my mother if we all die and she said yes, I apparently responded by nodding my head up and down. I was not troubled, I just merely made note of it. I think that the young maiden in the poem does responds to the narrator the way she does for this very reason- and I think by looking at the form of the poem, we can see that Wordsworth’s intention was to show that circling back to what might seem like an immature or undeveloped form of looking at things is perhaps the best way to cope with tragic occurrences. Perhaps just accepting the world and all that we are offered is the only way to be sane. “We Are Seven” is written in ballad form, and has a simple abab rhyming pattern. Each of its sixteen stanzas contains four lines except for the last stanza- which contains a (literally) defiant fifth line:

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"

The fairly simple language and rhyme scheme are so musical and easy to read in order to show that, much like the little maiden shows the pompous-seeming narrator (who remains unmoved by her wonderful way of treating death and insists that his trying to talk sense into her is wasted), the most fruitful, beautiful and deeply meaningful messages don’t always come in beautiful epic stanzas with gorgeous metaphors, etc. We can find so much beauty and truth in simplicity as opposed to many people’s incessant need to forever make things more complicated to find beauty in them, as well as the beauty and truth in just accepting the way the world functions instead of incessantly questioning its ways.