1. Strange fits of passion have i
known
William Wordsworth
Mariana Visbal
Alejandra Escobar
Juliana Florez

2. Analysis
• The speaker proclaims that he has been the
victim of “strange fits of passion”; he says that
he will describe one of these fits, but only if
he can speak it “in the Lover’s ear alone.”
Lucy, the girl he loved, was beautiful—“fresh
as a rose in June”—and he traveled to her
cottage one night beneath the moon.

3. Structure
• The stanzas of “Strange fits of passion have I
known” fit an old, very simple ballad form,
employed by Wordsworth to great effect as part
of his project to render common speech and
common stories in poems of simple rhythmic
beauty.
• Each stanza is four lines long, each has alternating
rhymed lines (an ABAB rhyme scheme), and each
has alternating metrical lines of iambic
pentameter

4. 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.

5. • When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.

6. • 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

7. • 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

8. • In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eye I kept
On the descending moon.

9. • My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

10. • What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
'O mercy!' to myself I cried,
'If Lucy hould be dead!'