Woodspurge by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“The Woodspurge” is a sixteen-line poem divided into four-line stanzas that describe a grief-stricken
narrator in an outdoor setting. In his depressed state, the narrator emotionally observes the details of
the woodspurge, a species of weed.
The poem’s first stanza presents the countryside and begins to suggest the narrators’ state of mind.
The narrator is not walking toward a specific destination; he moves in the direction the wind is blowing
and once the wind ceases, he stops and sits in the grass. The fact that his walking and stopping are
guided merely by the wind indicates aimlessness and passivity.
The narrator’s posture in the second stanza indicates that he feels exceedingly depressed. Sitting on
the grass he is hunched over with his head between his knees. This shows that he is insecure. His
depression is so severe that he cannot even groan aloud or speak a word of grief. His head is cast down,
as is his soul – so much that his hair is touching the grass. He remains in this position for an unknown
length of time but long enough that he “heard the day pass”.
In the third stanza, “My eyes, wide open, had the run” let the readers know about the sudden changes
in his attitude. He finally accepts what had happened and knows that he has to move on. From his
seated position, he says there are “ten weeds” that his eyes can “fix upon”. This reflects that he sees
his problem and becomes aware of it. He realizes that the “weeds” (his problem) are in his way and the
hardiness of the “weeds” tells that the problem that he faced are hard to be rid of. Out of that group, a
flowering woodspurge captures his complete attention and he is dramatically impressed by the detail
that it flowers as “three cups in one”.
The narrator attributes his depressed state to “perfect grief” in the final stanza. He then comments
that grief may not function to bring wisdom and may not even be remembered. He implies that he
himself learned nothing from his grief that day and can no longer remember its cause. However, “One
thing then learnt remains to me”: the shape of the woodspurge and consequently, its image had
visually overwhelmed him and the fact that “The woodspurge has a cup of three” has been vividly
burned into his memory forever.
Themes and Meanings
Although the cause of the narrator’s sorrow is never specified, the poem was written in the spring of
1856 when Rossetti was in an anguished state. By leaving the cause of the narrator’s depression
unspecified, Rossetti gives universal expression to the psychological phenomenon of acute mental
awareness and heightened sensation simultaneously with mental and emotional distress.
Although “The Woodspurge” has a plant’s name as its title, the poem does not have nature, or even the
woodspurge itself, as its subject. Nature does play an indirect role in the poem, but it is not the focus
here or in other works by Rossetti. Both in his painting and poetry, the function of nature is to act as a
background for the presentation of human action and emotion. The depiction of details from nature is
not meant to draw attention to nature itself but to mirror an inner experience.
In conclusion, “The Woodspurge” is about the narrator’s grief and that an insignificant detail or image
can remain vivid after emotional pain is forgotten. It concentrates on creating emotional effect,
accuracy of detail and the use of nature as a framework for the expression of the mental and emotional
state of the narrator.
The speaker in "The Woodspurge" experiences a connection with nature that is similar to
the way Romantic poets emphasized the bridge between the individual imagination and the
vitality of the natural world. Unlike the Romantic bridge, which emphasized an
imaginative/creative connection with nature, Rossetti is illustrating a more sensual,
dreamlike connection. The speaker is grief-stricken, aimless, and looking for sensual
significance: something in the external world to balance, makes sense of, or cancel out those
internal feelings.
In the first stanza, death is invoked and we know from the second and final stanzas that the
speaker is coming from a state of profound grief:
My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
The speaker is now sitting in this second stanza, too grief-stricken and aimless to verbalize
(Alas!) his grief. The speaker's tone is melancholy, depressed, but also moving towards an
unconscious trance. His focus shifts from grief to a dreamlike but heightened experience of
perception. The woodspurge just happens to be the intoxicated (captivated) speaker's object
of observation. In the last stanza, he suggests that no wisdom can come from this grieving
(he never notes what the cause of the grief is). Instead, the thing that he will remember is
the image of the woodspurge.
From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory;
One thing then learned remains to meThe woodspurge has a cup of three.
The speaker has effectively submitted to a kind of trance wherein he is focused on his
sense perceptions. The speaker concentrates on particular, albeit (although) mundane,
things to the point that he is more in tune with those things than he is with his grief. In the
first stanza, when he walks, the wind moves; when he sits, the wind is still. He is now being
guided by nature; not his inner thoughts/grief. The shortness of the words and the simplicity
of the poem illustrate the speaker's focus on the simplistic things around him.
There is something very simple but profound happening here. One interpretation of this
poem is about how we remember seemingly trivial things in times of intense psychological
feelings. For example, one might remember trains whistling during a funeral of a loved one.
We focus on such things during times of good and bad psychological intensity as a
meditation and as a dual function of distraction and integration. In other words, one might
dwell on the train whistle (or woodspurge) to push the grief aside for the time being. But
one might also dwell on the woodspurge to attribute greater significance to the woodspurge
because, at a time of such grief, a person is inwardly and outwardly looking for answers:
looking for significance in everything.
That said, this is about looking and about perception. The speaker does not make some profound
statement about grief. He is describing his heightened sense of external perception during a time of
inner turmoil.