We Are Seven

“I hit my peak at seven”

Named by a community reader, and the closest poem in the English canon to what seven is doing. Wordsworth's cottage girl counts two dead siblings among her seven, and the adult speaker cannot argue her out of it; the poem ends with her arithmetic intact and his correction spent. seven runs the same structure through a different subject. Its narrator reports a household in the only terms available to her - the house is haunted, the father is angry, those two facts must be connected - and the adult reader silently corrects her while the poem declines to. In both cases the child's account is factually wrong and the knowledge inside it is not.