Grief
The speaker in “The Woodspurge” is in the throes of deep sorrow—what he calls "perfect grief" (13). This grief is the defining emotion and tone throughout the entire poem, and the speaker does not find any respite from this state. The positioning of his forehead between his knees indicates that the speaker is in deep agony thus cannot even hold his head up. Furthermore, his drawn-in lips suggest that the speaker does not want to or cannot speak about what is bothering him. The speaker's grief has made him completely passive to the elements of nature, which act upon him. In the first stanza, he moves aimlessly with the wind, because he cannot think for himself.
The power of nature
In the face of his insurmountable grief, the speaker feels so powerless that he cannot even fight against the wind in Stanza 1. When the wind is blowing, the speaker moves according to the wind, and when the wind stops, so does the speaker. The speaker's hair falls upon the grass, and his ears pick up the sounds of the passing day—however, he himself is not fully present. His aimless eyes fall upon a woodspurge in the shade, and it is the only thing that sticks with him in his time of grief.
In a way, the speaker is completely in communion with nature in this scene. He is not an active individual; instead, he is just as much a part of the landscape as the wind, or the "dead" leaves that are shaken out of the trees (2). The way that the poem is organized emphasizes this point: we start with a large-scale view of a landscape, then Rossetti narrows our view to the speaker himself, and then he narrows our view even further so that we are looking at what the speaker is looking at—the woodspurge. The way that the speaker is sandwiched between natural elements emphasizes that he is merely a part of this larger scene.
