Relationships with the Dead in Wordsworths We Are Seven and Hardys Di

Relationships with the Dead in Wordsworths We Are Seven and bald-faceds digging One nominate outlast death not in a divine after life but only in a human one. If the poet dies or forgets his beloved, he murders her (Ramazani 131) Thomas Hardys belief of the poets duty of remembrance establishes the basis for his, Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?. Fearing he abandoned his own wife before her death, Hardy wrote the poem to assume the memorial responsibilities of the poet (Ramazani 131). Whereas Hardy tries to atone for his sins by continually grieving over his dead wife, the fuel behind William Wordsworths We Are Seven, is a question of being and existence (Trilling 57). This question stems from the fact that nothing was more difficult for Wordsworth in childhood than to strike the notion of death as a state applicable to his own being (Noyes 60). Despite the vastly different intentions of the poets, Hardy and Wordsworth both depict relationships between the living and the dead in their poems however, term Hardy humorously satirizes how the living forget the dead, Wordsworth demonstrates a childs refusal to acknowledge the dead as being gone. In their poems, Hardy and Wordsworth both elicit the use of dialogue however, the fictional conversation in Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?, contrasts the non-fictional dialogue in We Are Seven. Hardys poem uses the ballad convention of The restless Grave- a dialogue between living and dead (Johnson 48), in this case, between a deceased woman and her dog Wordsworths poem consists of an actual confrontation he had with a little girl when he traveled through Europe. Hardys willingness to use disembodied voices for the intended purpose of creating... ...ument Wordsworth brings up, the girl replies, Nay, we argon seven (Wordsworth 1333). She lacks the ability to abide death and this absence of awareness makes the poem so touching (Drabble 51). What began as a simple everyday conversation finished as a didactic and a round emotional poem. Wordsworth, through a real life conversation, presents the obscurity and perplexity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our inability to admit that notion (Noyes 60). In direct contrast to Wordsworth, who did not intend to writie a deep, meaningful poem, Hardy knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish by writing, Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave. People too easily remove the dead from their memories, and Hardy wanted to admonish his readers of the importance of remembering the dead just because the dead are gone, they should not be forgotten.