“The Woodspurge” is a sixteen-line verse form divided into four-line stanzas that describe a bereaved storyteller in an out-of-door scene. In his down province. the storyteller emotionally observes the inside informations of the woodspurge. a species of weed that has a three-part flower. The poem’s foremost stanza nowadayss a countryside and begins to propose the narrators’s province of head. The storyteller is non walking toward a specific finish ; he moves in the way the air current is blowing and one time the air current ceases. he stops and sits in the grass. The fact that his walking and fillet are guided simply by the air current indicates aimlessness and passiveness The narrator’s position in the 2nd stanza indicates that he feels extremely depressed. Siting on the grass he is hunched over with his caput between his articulatio genuss. This shows that he is insecure.

His depression is so terrible that he can non even moan aloud or talk a word of heartache. His caput is cast down. as is his psyche – so much that his hair is touching the grass. He remains in this place for an unknown length of clip but long plenty that he “heard the twenty-four hours pass” . In the 3rd stanza. “My eyes. broad unfastened. had the run” let the readers know about the sudden alterations in his attitude. He eventually accepts what had happened and knows that he has to travel on. From his seated place. he says there are “ten weeds” that his eyes can “fix upon” . This reflect that he sees his job and becomes cognizant of it. He realises that the “weeds” ( his job ) are in his manner and the robustness of the “weeds” tells that the job that he faced are difficult to be rid of.

Out of that group. a flowering woodspurge captures his complete attending and he is dramatically impressed by the item that it flowers as “three cups in one” . The storyteller attributes his down province to “perfect grief” in the concluding stanza. He so remarks that heartache may non work to convey wisdom and may non even be remembered. He implies that he himself learned nil from his heartache that twenty-four hours and can no longer retrieve its cause. However. “One thing so learnt remains to me” : He had been visually overwhelmed by the form of the woodspurge and accordingly. its image and the fact that “The woodspurge has a cup of three” have been vividly burned into his memory everlastingly.

Subjects and Meanings

Although the cause of the narrator’s sorrow is ne’er specified. the verse form was written in the spring of 1856 when Rossetti was in an tormented province. He
was sing intense discord with Elizabeth Siddal over the issue of her desire for matrimony. Rossetti was besides tormented at that clip about relationships with other adult females and what he perceived as doomed of artistic chances. However. nil in the verse form points to these specific issues. By go forthing the cause of the narrator’s depression unspecified. Rossetti gives cosmopolitan look to the psychological phenomenon of acute mental consciousness and heightened esthesis at the same time with mental and emotional hurt.

Although “The Woodspurge” has a plant’s name as its rubric. the verse form does non hold nature. or even the woodspurge itself. as its topic. Nature does play an indirect function in the verse form. but it is non the focal point here or in other plants by Rossetti. Both in his picture and poesy. the map of nature is to move as a background for the presentation of human action and emotion. The word picture of inside informations from nature is non meant to pull attending to nature itself but to mirror an interior experience. In decision. “The Woodspurge” is about the narrator’s heartache and that an undistinguished item or image can stay graphic after emotional hurting is forgotten. It concentrates on making emotional consequence. truth of item and the usage of nature as a model for the look of the mental and emotional province of the storyteller.