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When a child is presented with an experience of great negativity, something as severe as death or abuse, the child almost always finds a way to cope with the negativity through their own mental imagination. In extreme cases, children are known to develop schizophrenia because they make up another person within themselves to aid in dealing with the problems. Although Wordsworth did not conjure up another being within to assist him, he created this girl on paper to help the process of dealing with death as an adult. Wordsworth is not only fighting with this young girl who claims "dead is still alive," but he is ultimately fighting with himself. The girl represents him and the trials with death that he faced as a young boy and now cannot fully triumph over. .
A person wonders what happiness can possibly come from such a atrocity and in this case Wordsworth uses the girl to show she still possesses a nature that is giddy and playful aside from the tragedy that occurred within her life. Here Wordsworth characterizes the girl as happy by demonstrating her playful nature, "And all the summer dry, Together round her grave we played, my brother John and I." (54-56). This ability the girl has to play around the grave where her siblings lie illustrates her ability to stay close to the idea of death but to accept a feeling of resolution and understanding. When bringing the poem to a close, Wordsworth expresses his insecurity regarding the absence of the two dead children, ""But they are dead, those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!" "Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, "Nay, we are seven!"" (65-69) The narrator cannot accept this young and innocent view in turn proving the ability Wordsworth lacks to accept the fate that life has dealt him. .
In Wordsworth's "The Thorn" he tells a story of a woman who cries out nightly for her child and mourns for the loss of it.