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STRANGE fits of passion have I known By William Wordsworth
STRANGE fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.
Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"
The rhyme scheme is simply ABAB. The speaker is riding a horse late at night to see the girl, Lucy, whom he is in love with. The poem suggests that the speaker has gone on this journey before as he says the paths are dear to him. After the scenario is explained, the speaker becomes fixated on the moon which seems to be guiding him to his love’s house. To me, the moon symbolizes the onset of Lucy’s death, and there seems to be a race between the speaker’s arrival and the setting of the moon behind Lucy’s house.