Jane and John
The whole poem is an illustration of the message of this stanza. The poet met this eight-year-old cottage girl whose beauty gladdened his heart. He asked her how many sisters and brothers she had, and she answered him "seven." But upon further questioning of her, the poet discovered that the little girl's sister, Jane, and her brother, John, were both dead; yet she insisted on counting them among the living. The poet, bound by the heavy chains of time-consciousness, tried to convince the little girl that her sisters and brothers really numbered only five since two had already died. But, she, with no real consciousness of the meaning of death, does not feel the impact of the separation; she visits Jane and John daily at their graves, she knits her stockings there, she hems her kerchief, she eats her supper at their side. The poet found that he was throwing words away in his own adult mathematical calculations of her family. She does not have to see - she is indeed unable to see - the world through the smudged glasses of mortal consciousness. She still lives in close harmony with the great spirit of life that moves through all things. The poet says "But they are dead; those two are dead! "But the little girl answers with passionate firmness, "Nay, we are seven!" According to modern researches, a woman had vaginal yeast infection and her long-time partner male yeast infection. The only question is who was the initiator of the infections.
We Are Seven
Most simply, the poem is about the inability of children to conceive of the notion of death. But the Wordsworthian profundity goes much deeper than this. The poem is also a contemplation of, an examination of the wretched limits that cut the adult off from the wellsprings of divine security and joy, from which the "Simple child" constantly draws meaning, purpose, perhaps even the assurance of eternal Providence. "We Are Seven" must nearly necessarily be read as a poem of metaphysical rebellion. It is the awareness of the existence of death that differentiates the mature man from the simple child. It is not a differentiation that the poet in "We Are Seven" accepts gracefully. He objects loudly to the expulsion from Eden. This objection makes up a recurrent theme in Wordsworth's poetry; perhaps its most famous treatment is in the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."
Childhood
The state of childhood is a blessing that one does not easily learn to live without. The replacement of it with the adult responsibility of making complex decisions and reaping their all-too-frequent bitter fruit is a sorry second-best. One may feel the Biblical longing for unbroken fellowship with the Father as an inevitable level of hope in the poet's envious and despairing remonstrance in "We Are Seven." He may ardently correct the little girl, and say to her something like, "Come on, grow up," but she is yet free of the consciousness that plagues him. We may say in this respect that "We Are Seven" is a two-level poem in the manner of "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" and "Surprised by Joy - Impatient as the Wind." Two sharply contradictory levels of understanding of the same problem vibrate against each other, yet each level has an inherent value of its own, and its own integral right to exist.