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A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal is a short choir piece based on a poem of the same name by William Wordsworth. The poem is from a set by Wordsworth known as the Lucy poems and is the only work in the collection not to mention her name. The poem is meant to represent the death of Lucy and Wordsworth’s depiction of this death. He does so by paralleling her death to slumber. The poem is not entirely gloomy, however, as Wordsworth comes to terms with Lucy’s death by equating her spiritual existence to the beauty of the nature around him and by implying that he can still be with her through transcendental sleep.