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LINES 11-12 But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! In the poem's final lines, the speaker casts aside all prior hesitation and firmly acknowledges Lucy's death. In his or her final exclamation, the speaker pays tribute to Lucy by recognizing both her impact and mystery. Whereas line 10 evades the fact of Lucy's death—the rather formal "ceased to be" avoids death's painful language—line 11 acknowledges it firmly. Lucy "is in her grave." It doesn't get more permanent than that. Having started "Beside the springs of Dove," risen from the earth in the form of a "violet," and sprung all the way to the stars, Lucy has returned to her earthly origin. The speaker admits to him- or herself that while it may be possible to preserve Lucy's memory, her real being, for which there is no match, is gone for good. "But she is in her grave," the speaker says. The sharp monosyllables are delivered in unflagging iambic tetrameter, as if the speaker, in order to tell this final truth in the least painful way possible, submits to an automatic instinct. And yet, before the line ends, caesura intervenes and restores the speaker's imperfect grief. Here, it is a quiet grief. The apostrophe, "oh," is muted, no capital letters or exclamation marks to be seen. The speaker doesn't shout, but hesitates. The speaker senses that the poem's end is nearing, and wants to make absolutely sure that it gets expressed properly, in a way that honors Lucy. The commas slow the line. The "oh," though quiet and lowercase, is extremely heavy. With the word "grave" in mind, the reader might interpret the "oh" as loaded with gravity, or emotional weight. Its slow, heavy silence also enhances, through contrast, the fast, charged shout of the final line: "The difference to me!" Though it's fairly obvious throughout the poem, here the speaker finally identifies him- or herself as more than just an abstracted voice: the speaker uses the pronoun "me." If beforehand the speaker withheld explicit emotion, the speaker uses the final line to express all of it—though through a form of withholding. That is, the word "difference" contains pretty much all of the line's emotion, but it withholds information. The speaker doesn't explain what the difference actually is, but rather leaves it open to interpretation. Paradoxically, by withholding specifics, a restrictive action, the speaker opens the line's interpretive possibilities. Here, the difference is everything: without Lucy, the speaker's world is entirely different. Nothing between the earth and the stars fails to remind him or her of the beautiful young woman who "dwelt among the untrodden ways." The abstract, formless difference also recalls Lucy's mysterious "Half hidden" quality, the impossibility of ever fully understanding her. And the fact that no one else can really relate? That may be the only thing that doesn't make a difference.