The Woodspurge Essay Questions

Is the woodspurge a symbol for anything in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Woodspurge"? Why or why not? Try to use evidence from the poem itself to back up your answer.

While many people think that the woodspurge is a symbol for Christianity in Rossetti's "The Woodspurge," the poem itself does not fully support this interpretation. The speaker seems to be caught off guard by the simple fact that the woodspurge has three cups—it's the only observation that is repeated twice in the entire poem—and that the number three holds Christian resonances because of the Holy Trinity. However, the speaker himself says that "wisdom" and "memory" are useless in the face of grief (14). Religions like Christianity believe in the eternal wisdom of their doctrine, and they rely on the memory of their followers that has been passed down for generations to stay alive. In this way, the speaker of "The Woodspurge" could be seen as taking an anti-Christian stance, which negates any Christian symbolism readers believe to have found in the poem.

What is more powerful in "The Wordspurge": mankind or nature? Back up your reasoning with evidence from the poem.

The natural world is more powerful than mankind in "The Woodspurge." We see this from the very first stanza of the poem, in which the speaker's actions are completely dictated by the wind. Similarly, the resolution that the speaker comes to at the end of the poem is dependent upon the woodspurge. If it weren't for the woodspurge, which is a product of the natural world, he might be aimlessly wandering the English countryside forever.