Explore the themes of death, knowledge and nature in Wordsworth's "We are Seven". Refer closely to the poem in your answer.

In his preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, William Wordsworth says of “We are Seven” that it evinces ‘the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death’. However, the tension between this nuanced “perplexity” and ignorant “obscurity” is not the child’s alone to navigate – the interlocutor’s conception of death, even as he exams the girl, is examined in turn by the reader. The Wordsworth of the preface – who speaks of childhood’s ‘inability to admit’ the notion of death – is echoed by the Wordsworth of the poem’s first stanza: ‘What should [children] know of death?’. The “should” seems intentionally vague, acting either as an assertion of children’s ignorance, or positing a genuine moral and philosophical question. Both readings are determinedly abstracted from the child of the text: a “child” not a “girl”, an “it” not a “she”. Such an impersonal introduction suggests the speaker is attempting to appear an impartial, rational observer on the scene to come. Yet it is clear from the outset that the voice is prejudiced. The child is introduced as a ‘little cottage Girl’ – all words that had associations with lack of learning, as well as of innocence. The poem strives to discern whether it is fair to conflate these terms – innocence and ignorance – or if innocence might, itself, be a source of insight and understanding. The child’s view of death is inextricably linked with the natural world: ‘Their graves are green’ and ‘lie / Beneath the church-yard tree’. The girl, too, is described as having ‘a rustic, woodland air, / And she was wildly clad’. This is no doubt partly an exemplification of Wordsworth’s philosophy – that children possess an intrinsic affinity for the natural world; yet it also signifies a fuller – and inherently Romantic – conception of death to which the poem’s narrator appears oblivious. The girl relates the passing of her brother through the medium of natural phenomena, the shifting seasons becoming emblematic of the natural progression from life to death. The “green” graves suggest that, as part of the cycle of nature, fresh life may spring from death. The punctuation and feminine ending on the final line – in open conflict with the iambic trimeter – act as a triumphant reminder of the girl’s defiance, her stubborn refusal to accept both the interlocuter’s logic and the poet’s metre (each affirmative “seven” throughout the poem disturbs the rhythm of the line). The poem’s theme is prescient considering the two children that Wordsworth would lose. The poet’s belief that children have a better understanding and appreciation of nature (which is life) than adults is here mirrored: do they then also have a superior understanding of death?