William Wordsworth: Analysis of the poem 'Surprised By Joy'

Surprised by Joy is about Wordworth’s acceptance of his grief. The poem progresses from a lack of clear metrical structure to a rhythm with clarity. This change embodies Wordworth’s progression from cognitive dissonance to resolute cohesion of his emotions and thoughts.

The poets internal battle with opposing emotions of joy and grief are entrenched

The personification of the wind at the beginning of the poem

Surprised by Joy is about Wordworth’s acceptance of his eternal grief.
Surprised by Joy is about the opposition of instantaneity and eternity.
Surprised by Joy is about Wordworth’s acceptance of his eternal grief.

Wordsworth opposes his instantaneous joy brought on momentary forgetfulness against the indefinite reality of his daughters death, and concludes with the acceptance of his perpetual grief.

Surprised by Joy expresses a potent feeling of grief that Wordsworth experienced when he temporarily forgot about the death of his four year old daughter. To be surprised by joy would seem to imply that a feeling of happiness was then so rare that it retrospectively alarmed Wordsworth.

The statements/feelings come as shocks to the reader in each concesuitve phrase, reflecting the chronology of his reflection upon his loss.
Forgetting you, and that I have lost you was the second worst feeling o

the poem evoke the winds eternal presence on earth, existentially implying that change and loss are permanent

These sounds emphasis words both associated with infinity (silent, loss, no vicissitude, worst) and transiency (surprised, impatient, present, years, restore)

Fundamental the sonnet opposition of instantaneity and eternity

permanency of death and the accidental nature of thought
Words acceptance

Surprised by Joy is about the opposition of instantaneity and eternity. In the Romantic poem, Wordsworth finally accepts his eternal grief for his four-year-old daughter Catherine, who died 2 years before the sonnet’s publication

The poem progresses from a lack of clear metrical structure to a rhythm with accentual clarity. This change embodies Wordworth’s progression from cognitive dissonance to resolute cohesion of his emotions and thoughts.

u x u x u x u u u x
Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind u x u x u x x u x
I turned to share the transport — Oh! with whom u x u x u x u x u x
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, u x u u u x ux u x
That spot which no vicissitude can find?

The dimness of sound and meaning associated with the word “buried” adds to its potency in a quatrain filled loud alliterations of p’s, t’s and s’s. These strong sounds compel their stress throughout the sonnet. This could be allusion to the wind simile of the first line.

Nature: beautiful and permanent wind

the greatest part of mental life consists of reflections on our own ideas whats inside comes from outside
W is absorbing and answering the idea of interchange between man and nature - the idea that the mind modifies sensation as much as sensation modifies the mind.
Wordsworth portrays the mind as itself part of the nature it perceives
Wordsworth presents the perceiving mind as active
We can perceive the lack of clarity of thought with the interjection and shortness of periods in

Rhythm
Typical of Romanticism, the diction and rhythm of the sonnet exemplifies Wordworth’s inner thoughts; expressing feelings of vagueness, shock, and certain bereavement to the reader.

The combination of Caesura and Enjambment created by striking deictic punctuation compels the naturally stressed syllables in certain words to dictate the rhythm.

The end rhymes hold the chaotic thoughts together with loaded significance.

Much of Wordsworths poetry has the distinct bouncing motion of iambic pentameter, and although Surprised by Joy shares this same metre, it is so often interjected with questions, exclaimations, Caesura and Enjambment (and as such the 5 stress/5nonstress is not always consistent) that rhythm feels ambiguous.

Caesurae tumble clauses forward onto the next line, just as thoughts necessitate subsequent thoughts
Enjambment. Cadence (double and triple unstressed syllables in a row

The sonnet begins with a loaded quatrain, full of elocutionary punctuation and potent causes. The reader cannot deny a feeling of profound tension, although prosody shows us that the poem is in iambic pentameter.

The caesurae created by dashes circumvent all inherent desire to settle into a rhythm and thus each statement pangs. Enjambment is used effectively to trail from the gasp of “Oh!” to stress “Thee”, but more so, to stress the clause which proceeds.

Language
The poem maintains a sense of consistency of end rhymes, each word loaded with significance.

Language
Punctuation
Syntax

; and it is this connection, sensed through what Wordsworth calls joy - an intensification of Hume's "vivacity" - that gives us confidence in the reality of ourselves and the external world
F. R. Leavis and Donald Davie have shown, through an analysis of Wordsworth's syntax, how he gives us poetry by blurring the thought. One can say even more specifically that Wordsworth gives us poetry by being both Lockean and anti-Lockean at the same time. For Wordsworth answers Locke by using the Lockean concepts of memory and association. It is only through memory, says Locke, that the mind has any effectiveness, and he equates the self with the sum of conscious memory ("whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to whom they both belong"). But Locke does not speak of memory as modifying the actions remembered; these actions remain fixed, like the data "remembered" by a computer. It is in speaking of the accidental association of ideas that Locke recognizes a modifying and transforming process. Locke accounts for our irrational behavior and for affect - for what he calls our "sympathies and antipathies" - by the connection through "chance or custom" of ideas that have no correspondence in nature or logic. Through association, in other words, sensations and ideas are transformed into something other than they would be in themselves, with a value they would not have in themselves.