We Are Seven

We are Seven opens with the narrator expressing the belief that a child with “life in every limb” should have no knowledge of death. However, the girl he meets, with her “rustic, woodland air, / and she was wildly clad;” clothing and manners that suggest she lives closer to nature than the narrator, she makes no such distinctions between life and death. “We are seven” is her constant refrain, despite the narrator’s insistence that if two of her siblings are dead, then there are only five, because the living and the dead cannot be counted together. Despite his belief, in some ways, the two dead siblings are closer to the girl, who lives in the churchyard cottage next to their graves and visits them regularly, than the other siblings who have moved to Conway or gone to sea.

When her sister died, the girl and her brother “round her grave played,” as though that is the most natural thing in the world and it is not Heaven but Earth that is important. The overall message seems to be that life and death are both parts of nature, dwelling side by side and therefore both parts must be accepted. The most important thing is not some distant heaven that you must strain to reach but instead a shared love of the physical, natural world where all people dwell, whether living or dead.