The Woodspurge Literary Elements

"The Woodspurge" has a first-person speaker who is an unnamed individual struck with grief. We don't know much about his personality, life, social status, or even his gender (some readers have speculated that because the speaker's hair is so long, it might be a woman—but look up Rossetti's self-portrait from when he was a young man, and you'll see that his hair nearly reached his shoulders). Part of the reason we don't know much about the speaker is because the poem's language is so sparse. Another reason we don't know anything about the speaker is because he's been completely overwhelmed with grief, to the extent that he has no sense of self. He's more like an empty shell.

"The Woodspurge" is a four-stanza poem. Each stanza has four lines, creating a total of 16 lines in the piece. The rhyme scheme is AAAA/BBBB. In other words, all of the lines rhyme with each other in each stanza. The meter is iambic tetrameter, which means there are four sets of unstressed/stressed syllable pairs. It sounds like "dun-DUN, dun-DUN, dun-DUN, dun-DUN."

There is alliteration of the "w" sound in line 3: "I had walk'd on at the wind's will."

lyric poetry

nature (probably the English countryside) in the late 19th century

bleak, sparse, depressed

Protagonist: speaker of the poem; Antagonist: grief, depression

How to survive when dealing with grief. The speaker understands, by the end of the poem, that in the face of "perfect grief"—in other words, grief to the highest extent—that what is left behind is not things like "wisdom" or "memory" (14). Instead, what is left behind are simple observations and facts of life—like the fact that the woodspurge has three cups. In this way, the conflict is resolved somewhat at the end of the poem.

In a way, the speaker's complete passivity in the first stanza could be an understatement of his presence in the scene:
"The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walk'd on at the wind's will,—
I sat now, for the wind was still" (1-4).

Even though the speaker portrays himself as completely mindless in this first stanza, as readers we operate under the assumption that he is a human being. Therefore, he must have some cognition that he is understating in this moment.

There is metonymy in line 2: "shaken out dead from tree and hill." In this line "dead" represents dead leaves and other dead matter that the wind carries.

The wind is personified in the first stanza: "The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still, / Shaken out dead from tree and hill" (1-2). In these lines, the wind is a personified force that guides, among other things, the depressed speaker.

The speaker personifies parts of his body in order to underscore his passivity as well. For example, he does not put his forehead between his knees; instead, "between [his] knees [his] forehead was" (5). Similarly, he does not decide not to speak; instead his "lips, drawn in, said not Alas" (6). He does not hear the world around him; instead, his "naked ears heard the day pass" (8).

There is onomatopoeia in the first line of the poem: "the wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still." "Flapp'd" is a description of the sound a piece of fabric makes in the wind.