William Wordsworth - We Are Seven (dramatic reading)

This beautiful poem is written in the ballad form and is found in the "Lyrical Ballads" (1798), the poetic anthology by Wordsworth and Coleridge that is considered the manifesto of English Romanticism.

Wordsworth was inspired to write the poem after travelling alone across England in 1793 and meeting a young girl while visiting Goodrich Castle, in the open countryside near the river Wye.

In the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads", Wordsworth wrote that this poem deals with ""the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion". While there is an obvious tragic feeling in the text, I find that there is also a sense of comforting serenity, as it expresses the idea that the bonds we form with the people who are dearest to us can't be weakened even by death of those people.