The muse is a personal figure for the speaker. “Few could know” Lucy’s presence or demise because she exists solely in the poet’s mind. Lucy dies at the end of each poem because, as an object of imagination, she cannot exist in reality. This tension between the poetic imagination and reality is a key theme.

The poet compares Lucy to a star, and not just any star. He states that she is as beautiful as a solitary star in the sky. He is telling the reader that Lucy is uncommonly beautiful. The image of the single star also represents Lucy’s role as a muse. Just as sailors would navigate according to the North Star, the speaker looks to Lucy for inspiration and direction.

Here Wordsworth uses figurative language to compare the poem's subject, Lucy, to a beautiful flower: a violet. The violet serves as a metaphor for Lucy’s otherworldly beauty and purity, particularly when contrasted with the “mossy stone.”

These lines depict Lucy as an abstract love object. She is defined not by her own qualities or actions but by the opinions and praise she receives from others. Thus, the love the speaker expresses for Lucy in the poem’s final line is a form of idealized love. Unrequited, idealistic longing is a central theme in these poems.

Wordsworth introduces the character of Lucy as a figure with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy. As in “Strange fits of passion have I known,” Lucy represents a fantasy for the speaker, suggested here by the “untrodden ways” in which she resides. Yet the “springs of Dove,” likely a location near Wordsworth’s own Dove cottage, gives the poem a setting in the real world. The tension between fantasy and reality is an important theme throughout the Lucy poems.

The Wordsworths lived in Dove Cottage, located on the outskirts of Grasmere in the Lake District of England, from December 1799 until May 1808. The “springs” mentioned here are likely found in the vicinity of the cottage.