"A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL" by William Wordsworth
Dove Cottage, Grasmere 
A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
1799.
READING:
This poem by Wordsworth powerfully illustrates the way in which a poem can generate multiple readings.It belongs to a series of poems called the 'Lucy' poems, which reflect on the death of an unknown girl. Biographically inclined critics have often attempted to determine the identity of this figure, but more troubling perhaps is the ambiguity of the poem.
In the first stanza his attitude can either be read as resigned to the person's death OR it is the poet bitterly considering his complacent blindness. If the first is the case then the poet accepts the death, is not fearful for the girl and is comforted by the ideas she is beyond the touch of time. In this reading, the second stanza is far from bitter and the poet understands that the dead return to the natural world. In many ways this reading would be in keeping with the Romantics' understanding of the importance of Nature.
Yet this reading is not satisfying. The first stanza is clearly in the past tense -- the second stanza is in the present. Perhaps in the past the narrator was simply complacent and did not suspect the girl could die. This reading suggests he has had a bitter revelation, and believes that the girl has been reduced to an inert object and is rolled (a fairly brutal image) around in the earth's daily course along with other objects. Nature here is less than comforting, and in this reading the poem stands apart in some ways from the Romantic's verneration of the powers of Nature.