“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” deals with the speaker reflecting and coping with the death of his beloved. The poem offers a thought-provoking take on using the concept of slumber to symbolize the illusion of perpetual youth and protection against human mortality. I initially viewed death as an eternal slumber, but Wordsworth’s perspective suggests otherwise: he portrays life alongside his beloved as a dream-like state of slumber and is only able to wake up to confront the grief and stark truth of human mortality after the death of his beloved. In this way, he suggests that confronting death is the only way to break out of the slumber that seals our spirits from enlightenment. 

The first stanza describes the speaker with his spirit sealed in slumber, meaning his mind is protected from the idea of mortality. Here, “I had no human fears” (line 2), though seemingly resolute, actually underscores his resistance to acknowledging the harsh realities of existence. He idealizes his beloved as immortal, unaffected by the passage of earthly time. This illusion of immortality, initially used to protect the speaker, only ends up hurting him more once she passes away because it makes it harder to accept the truth. In the second stanza, he states the obvious, “No motion… no force; / She neither hears no sees” (lines 5-6). Having awoken from his prolonged slumber, he realizes his beloved, like all humans, was affected by “earth’s dinural course” (line 7). To cope with this, he redirects her existence into rocks, stones, and trees, implying that she has become part of the earth and lives on.