Death in Memory
On ‘Surprised by Joy’ by William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth’s ‘Surprised by Joy’ is a Petrarchan sonnet written in iambic pentameter. Yet, it is not strictly iambic or Petrarchan, making many departures particularly in and after the sixth line. The poem opens each of its stanzas with a slant rhyme (“Wind” and “return”) and its octave contains three rhyming sounds (“find”, “whom” and “power”) instead of the usual two. The sestet follows the cdcdcd scheme, the only Petrarchan form to avoid a closing couplet. The first four lines are in perfect iambic pentameter. In the fifth, we see the first challenge to regularity, with the opening trochaic inversion of: “Love, faithful love…”. The irregularity hinted at in the fifth, takes over in the sixth. The inverted stress on “thee?” signals a metrical departure, with the next three lines exceeding the ten-syllable count. There is a return to regularity in the next five lines, for the poem then to close with another eleven-syllable line. The oscillating form of Wordsworth’s sonnet corresponds with the movement of its speaker’s emotions: his erratic emotional course, spurred the memory of a deceased other, is reflected in the poem’s protean structure.
‘Surprised by Joy’ is a sonnet about mourning. It was written after the death of Wordsworth’s three-year-old daughter Catherine. I will not assume a direct identity between the speaker and Wordsworth, yet I will assume the speaker to be one who, like Wordsworth, has lost a young daughter, whom he is mourning. The speaker is “surprised by joy” and instinctively turns to share this pleasure with his daughter, who he then remembers is dead and buried. He finds love to be that which caused the appearance of her memory before plunging into remorse at the realisation that he had forgotten her. Her momentary presence soon turns to absence at the realisation of her existence as only memory, which is felt by the speaker as a ‘second death’, with him equating the pain of her ‘return’ with the pain he first felt when he knew she was ‘no more’.
With the first phrase of his sonnet, Wordsworth drops us mid-stream into the consciousness of the speaker. The simple past tense of “surprised” presupposes a past for the speaker that exists outside of the text. We soon find that this pre-textual past must have been one of sadness. We know this just by the first phrase: joy is surprising to the speaker. This melancholic portrait is further painted by his “impatient” and immediate desire to share this “transport”, suggesting also his loneliness, his lack of socially mediated pleasure, and in “transport”, his desire to be elsewhere. This fantasy of sharing joy is bookended by dashes, which suggest the interruption of a fleeting thought, that is then put away with the speaker’s realisation that the desired other, “thee”, is dead and “long buried”. The deceased’s resting place is described as “that spot which no vicissitude can find”, in other words, death is a place out of reach and foreign to change, just as “vicissitude”, a Latin word, is foreign to the otherwise Germanic words of the line.
The regularity of the opening four lines imbues them with a steady, contemplative mood, which is then broken by the trochaic inversion which opens the fifth. The inversion of stress onto “Love” is the first swelling of emotion which causes the speaker to break the metre, which he immediately stresses again in the next foot. Love being that which “recalled thee” and also that without which there would be no pain, no mourning. In this sense, mourning is always about love. This same “love” is the impetus of remorse, which the speaker enters into in the caesura after he asks, “But how could I forget thee?”. The line then, in flurry of affect, breaks the conventional abbaabba Petrarchan rhyme scheme, introducing a new rhyme sound with “power” and runs on an extra syllable, breaking its pentameter. This paroxysm of remorse runs through two more eleven syllable lines, bursting out in the repetition of plosive ‘b-’ sounds in the eighth, before stopping with two strong stresses and an exclamation point in the ninth: “grievous loss! — “. The dash after “loss!” signals a temporary return to regular syllabic structure while also representing another departure from Petrarchan structure; it is the sonnet’s volta. The Petrarchan volta conventionally appears at the beginning of the ninth line, which here is home to an enjambed sentence which began in the sixth. This enjambed phrase ends with the dash come volta, after which the sonnet pivots from remorse to mourning.
As if a hangover from the formal fluctuation brought on by remorse, the sestet’s opening rhyme, “return”, rhymes only visually with its perfectly rhyming siblings “forlorn” and “unborn”. The first phrase (“that thought’s return”) after the volta plays almost an expository role, not partaking in verbal rhyme nor in the repetition of ‘-or’ sounds which recur throughout both rhymes of the sestet. Most pronounced in the double appearance of “forlorn”, this “-or” sound identifies the speaker’s passage into mourning by recalling the droning laments of the bereaved. The aforementioned “thought”, which is the presence of the deceased in memory, is also, for the speaker, the “worst pang that sorrow ever bore”, in that, her presence (in memory) is simultaneously that which makes her absence appear, which, once noticed, is registered by the speaker as the recurrence of her death. This ‘second death’ is then compared by the speaker with the pain of her first death. This first pain of losing his daughter is recalled in platitudinous language, naming her his “heart’s best treasure” and describing her “heavenly face”. It is in this recourse to platitude that we see the speaker move from mourning to acceptance.
To speak in platitude is adopt a language that is common, it is to exchange the individual expression of particularity for the collective expression of particularity, forfeiting, thereby, what once was particular to the universal. In passive acknowledgment of the universality of his mourning, the speaker reaches a closure, which brings with it the closure of the poem. Yet, this closure is not absolute. The sestet avoids the tidy ending of a rhyming couplet and returns to the irregularity before the volta by running off an extra syllable. Where absolute closure would leave no gap, these formal choices create a space for the deceased’s lingering memory and with it, the possibility of her return.
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Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport — Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind —
But how could I forget thee? — Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss! — That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
