sensual, dreamlike connection. The speaker is grief-stricken, aimless, and looking for sensual significance: something in the external world to balance, makes sense of, or cancel out those internal feelings.

In the first stanza, death is invoked and we know from the second and final stanzas that the speaker is coming from a state of profound grief:

My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!

My hair was over in the grass,

The speaker is now sitting in this second stanza, too grief-stricken and aimless to verbalize (Alas!) his grief. The speaker's tone is melancholy, depressed, but also moving towards an unconscious trance. His focus shifts from grief to a dreamlike but heightened experience of perception. The woodspurge just happens to be the intoxicated (captivated) speaker's object of observation. In the last stanza, he suggests that no wisdom can come from this grieving (he never notes what the cause of the grief is). Instead, the thing that he will remember is the image of the woodspurge.

From perfect grief there need not be

Wisdom or even memory;

One thing then learned remains to me-

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

The speaker has effectively submitted to a kind of trance wherein he is focused on his sense perceptions. It is like a meditation. The speaker concentrates on particular, albeit mundane, things to the point that he is more in tune with those things than he is with his grief. In the first stanza, when he walks, the wind moves; when he sits, the wind is still. He is now being guided by nature; not his inner thoughts/grief. The shortness of the words and the simplicity of the poem illustrate the speaker's focus on the simplistic things around him.

There is something very simple but profound happening here. One interpretation of this poem is about how we remember seemingly trivial things in times of intense psychological feelings. For example, one might remember a train whistle during a funeral of a loved one. We focus on such things during times of good and bad psychological intensity as a meditation and as a dual function of distraction and integration. In other words, one might dwell on the train whistle (or woodspurge) to push the grief aside for the time being. But one might also dwell on the woodspurge to attribute greater significance to the woodspurge because, at a time of such grief, a person is inwardly and outwardly looking for answers: looking for significance in everything.

That said, this is about looking and about perception. The speaker does not make some profound statement about grief. He is describing his heightened sense of external perception during a time of inner turmoil.

Dante Rossetti’s poem “The Woodspurge” describes a man who has undergone some kind of trauma.  He seems inconsolable as he walks out in nature. Rossetti uses the first person point of view with the man as his speaker. His surroundings are not really the kind of comfort that he needs. On the hill it is very windy. The wind blows and then stops, blows and stops. The natural world serves as a backdrop for the man’s misery.  

The wind flapp’d loose, the wind was still
Shaken out dead from tree and hill
I had walked on at the wind’s will
I sat now, for the wind was still.

As he walks along, the man is blown forward as though the wind was pushing him at will. He seems to have no will of his seeming aimless and passive. When the wind stops blowing, he sits down miserable and absorbed in his thoughts.

He gets down on his knees and bends over with his head touching the grass. His lips were pursed but he said nothing. When his ears touched the ground, he could hear the sounds of the world going by. The man’s posture as he leans forward on his head indicates his deep depression and mental state.  He does not say anything because he was too miserable to even groan.

His ears are described as naked as he touches the ground.  What he has heard has given him the sense of having no protection from the world’s hurts.  As he listens to the sounds of nature, the reader can almost feel his pain. 

The narrator looks around where he lay and saw some weeds.  He fixes his eyes on a flower that grew  out of the middle of the weeds: a woodspurge.  This flower is unusual because it has three cups, standing tall growing toward the sun. The narrator notices the woodspurge amongst the other weeds, and remarks that it flowers as “three cups in one”.