“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Introduction

• "Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind" is an autobiographical sonnet in which William Wordsworth writes of his grief for his daughter Catherine, who died when she was just three years old. The poem's speaker describes being "surprised by joy," getting caught up in a brief moment of unexpected happiness. This joy comes to a swift and terrible end when he "turn[s] to share the transport" with his beloved child, only to remember that—of course—she isn't there, and never will be again. The speaker's shocking return to his grief is nearly as painful for him as the very day he learned his daughter had died. Grief, this poem suggests, is a constant, terrible, and unpredictable companion; even brief escapes from it only give it greater force when it returns. Wordsworth first published this poem in his 1815 collection Poems (three years after Catherine's death) and republished it in 1820. This guide examines the more commonly anthologized 1820 version.

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“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Summary

• Struck suddenly by joy—hasty as the winds—I turned to share my overpowering happiness—but oh! I was turning to find you, you who have been buried in the silence of the grave for so long, in the one place no trouble can touch. Love, loyal love, brought you back to my mind—but how could I ever have forgotten you? What intense power was able to allure me (even for the tiniest fraction of an hour) so much that I was temporarily blind to my horrible loss? The return of my grief was the worst pain I ever felt—the worst pain but one, only one. The very worst pain came when I stood in hopelessness, knowing that the one I loved most in the world had died: knowing that neither this moment, nor any of the years to come, could ever bring that deeply beloved face back to me.

“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Themes

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  The Inescapability of Grief

  William Wordsworth wrote this autobiographical poem after the death of his little daughter Catherine, who only lived to be three years old. Here, he describes what might at first sound like the beginnings of a recovery from grief—but what turns out to be only a reminder of grief's terrible permanence.

  The poem's speaker (a voice for Wordsworth himself) finds himself "surprised by joy," experiencing a sudden "transport" of happiness that seems to come out of nowhere. But it can't last. Caught up in his happiness, the speaker turns to "share the transport" with his beloved child—only to remember that she's gone, never to return.

  The experience of briefly forgetting that his child is dead leaves the speaker in an emotional quandary. He knows that it's "love, faithful love" that brought her to mind when he felt a surprising moment of joy: it's because he loves her so deeply that he wants to share his happiness with her. But he's horrified by the fact that he can even experience joy—that he could be "blind / To [his] most grievous loss" for even "the least division of an hour" (the tiniest fraction of a moment).

  The speaker's brief escape from overwhelming grief thus becomes only another expression of that grief. Momentarily forgetting that he can't share his joy with his child, he's forced to relive the "worst pang" of pain over again, re-experiencing the horrific moment in which he first learned his daughter had died.

  Grief, this poem thus suggests, is (like death itself) inescapable and permanent. Even a temporary lifting of grief can in itself become part of grief, a reminder of what has been and what can never be.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”

• Lines 1-2

  Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
  I turned to share the transport

  "Surprised by joy" begins with the speaker's moment of "transport"—a mighty happiness. The speaker describes his experience in language that suggests he's overwhelmed by his sensations:

  Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  The highlighted parallelism here puts the speaker's sudden emotions front and center. Readers encounter his exhilarating surprise and impatience before they know anything else about him.

  And why surprise, why impatience? The kind of joy that strikes the speaker here seems to come out of nowhere; perhaps he hasn't felt happy in some time. The simile "impatient as the Wind" captures something of what this sudden happiness feels like: it's as if he's caught up in an invisible force, swept along by his emotion.

  Maybe the breezy simile also subtly invites readers to imagine where and how the speaker has been "surprised by joy." This being a poem by Wordsworth—one of the foremost English Romantic poets, famed for his profound feeling for natural beauty—readers might picture the speaker standing on the windswept crest of a hill, surprised by some "impulse from a vernal wood," some intense experience of wonder at the world around him.

  Carried along on the winds of joy, the speaker feels moved: he's propelled into action. The natural thing to do when one is surprised by joy and impatient as the wind, it seems, is to "turn[] to share the transport"—to turn to look for a companion with whom to relish this joy, to redouble its beauty.

  It's at this moment that the poem becomes a tragedy.

• Lines 2-4

  —Oh! with whom
  But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
  That spot which no vicissitude can find?

  

  

• Lines 5-9

  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!

  

  

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• Lines 9-12

  —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;

  

  

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• Lines 13-14

  That neither present time, nor years unborn
  Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

  

  

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“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Rhetorical Question

  Wordsworth's use of rhetorical questions in "Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind" helps to create a mood of helpless, wondering grief. Like King Lear clutching the body of his dead daughter, this poem's speaker is assailed by the unanswerable questions that the deaths of those we love force upon us. But while Lear is in the first dazed shock of grief, this speaker is experiencing a new and dreadful confusion: the experience of forgetting, for a fraction of a second, that the person one loves has died.

  The first of the speaker's rhetorical questions interrupts a moment in which he's "surprised by joy"—experiencing a sudden intense happiness. Swept up in the moment, he turns to look for his child, feeling a natural impulse to share his happiness with her. Then he realizes anew that she's not there, and that she can never be with him again.

  He presents this plain hard fact in the form of a question:

  I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
  But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
  That spot which no vicissitude can find?

  Consider for a moment how this idea might land differently if Wordsworth hadn't phrased it as a question. A straight-ahead statement of the speaker's discovery might suggest the flat inescapability of grief. The rhetorical question instead captures a double shock: the shock of remembering one's child is gone, and the shock of realizing that one has managed to forget this for a moment. By framing this idea as a question, Wordsworth captures the sheer bewilderment of grief.

  That effect only gets stronger as the speaker keeps asking more rhetorical questions:

  But how could I forget thee? [...]

  The question points to a strange doubleness in the speaker's experience. His pain, of course, comes precisely from the fact that he never could and never can forget his child. That's why he's looking for her in his moment of happiness. What he has forgotten is her death. And that makes sense: if he could be happy even for a moment, then he must have briefly been free from the thought of his "most grievous loss."

  His third and final question is so emphatically rhetorical (that is, unanswerable) that Wordsworth doesn't even punctuate it with a question mark:

  [...] —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! [...]

  This question captures a whole range of emotions: guilt, marvel, and perhaps even fear. Wondering "what power" could have taken him away from his grief even for a fraction of a second, the speaker captures his own powerlessness. He could do nothing to save his child, nor can he do anything to get her back. And now, he can do nothing to save himself from the body-blow of forgetting, then remembering, the worst pain of his life.

  • See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

• Apostrophe

  

  
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• Repetition

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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"Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Transport
• Vicissitude
• The least division of an hour
• Beguiled
• Grievous
• Pang
• Bore

• A rush of overwhelming feeling.

  • See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”

• Form

  “Surprised by joy” is an Italian sonnet (a.k.a. a Petrarchan sonnet, after the great medieval Italian sonneteer Petrarch). Italian sonnets typically follow a strict pattern:

  • They’re 14 lines long.
  • They’re written in iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Surprised | by joy— | impa- | tient as | the wind.”
  • And they use a traditional rhyme scheme. Italian sonnets always start out with an octet (an eight-line passage) rhymed ABBA ABBA. Then, in their six closing lines (known as a sestet), they switch to one of a number of possible patterns of C, D, and sometimes E rhymes. (The English or Shakespearean sonnet uses a different traditional pattern.)

  When Wordsworth wrote sonnets, he nearly always reached for the Italian form. Here, he uses the flexible rhymes in the sestet to create a particularly poignant effect, leaving the word “return”—a thing his lost child can never do—unpartnered and unanswered. (More on that in the Rhyme Scheme section of this guide.)

  The sonnet form is rigorous and compact, and it demands a lot of artistic skill and restraint. In choosing a controlled form to describe a vast, engulfing, nearly unendurable grief, perhaps Wordsworth is trying to find a container for the uncontainable.

• Meter

  Like nearly all sonnets, “Surprised by joy” is written in iambic pentameter. That means that its lines use five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here’s how that sounds in line 1:

  Surprised | by joy— | impa- | tient as | the wind

  Like many sonneteers, however, Wordsworth plays with this steady pulse, varying his meter for musical and emotional effect. Listen to what happens in line 5 when the speaker’s grief returns to him after his brief glimpse of joy, for instance:

  Love, faith- | ful love, | recalled | thee to | my mind –

  The first foot here is not an iamb, but a spondee: two strong stresses in a row (DUM-DUM). That means that the crucial word “love” stands out. (The comma caesura helps, too: the pause in "Love, || faithful love" highlights the word even more boldly.)

• Rhyme Scheme

  "Surprised by joy" uses one of the traditional rhyme schemes of the Italian sonnet. All Italian sonnets start with an octave (an eight-line passage) that rhymes like so:

  ABBA ABBA

  Then, the poem closes with a sestet (a six-line passage), which can use any one of a number of different patterns of C, D, and E rhymes. A typical pattern might be a CDCDCD or a CDECDE. But Wordsworth chooses these rhymes:

  CDEDED

  That one C rhyme sits all alone. Sure, "return" forms something like a slant rhyme with "forlorn" and "unborn"—but the tight, perfect rhyme between the latter two words can't help but make "return" stand out. The word's loneliness might feel particularly poignant considering that the sestet describes the speaker's longing for a person he knows can never return to him: his dead child.

“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Speaker

• The speaker is a voice for Wordsworth himself. In 1812, Wordsworth and his wife Mary endured two impossible losses: their three-year-old daughter Catherine and their six-year-old son Thomas both died, Catherine in June and Thomas in December. In this poem, scholars tend to agree, Wordsworth mourns Catherine in particular—a child much beloved by the whole Wordsworth family (and beyond: she was a favorite among the Wordsworths' friends, too).

  Perhaps especially painful for this speaker is the moment of relief that arrives at the very beginning of the poem. For just a second, the speaker is "surprised by joy": joy pounces on him when he least expects it. But the height of his happiness leaves him with further to fall when he "turn[s] to share the transport" with his beloved child—only to remember that she's gone. Appalled that he could have forgotten her death "even for the least division of an hour," he suffers one of the worst agonies of his life, a pain second only to the horror of the moment he stood by his beloved child's deathbed.

“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Setting

• While there’s no clear setting in this poem, readers familiar with Wordsworth might guess that it takes place in the Lake District, a beautiful region in the north of England indelibly associated with the English Romantic poets. This poem is sadly autobiographical: Wordsworth wrote it after the death of two of his young children, Catherine (age 3) and Thomas (age 6). At the time of the children’s deaths, Wordsworth and his family lived in the little town of Grasmere.

  Wordsworth loved to walk, and he spent a lot of time exploring the hills, valleys, and peaks around his home. He and his brilliant sister Dorothy (whose journals inspired many of her brother’s poems) habitually turned to nature for wisdom, comfort, and inspiration—and, indeed, for “joy.” When the poem’s speaker is “surprised by joy” at the beginning of the poem, then, it seems not unlikely that he’s experiencing a moment of “transport” over some glorious vista. His description of himself as “impatient as the wind” supports this idea, subtly suggesting that he’s standing on the windswept crest of a hill, getting caught up in what’s around him.

  But while the natural world typically gave Wordsworth profound solace, here it can offer the speaker only a brief moment of respite. And that respite only makes his grief hurt worse when it returns a fraction of a second later. This poem feels doubly tragic when one reads it biographically: if even Wordsworth can only be consoled by nature for a moment, then his grief must be truly monumental.

Literary and Historical Context of “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”

• Literary Context

  William Wordsworth (1770–1850) first published "Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind" in 1815, some while after his revolutionary poetic heyday. In his youth, he and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge kicked off the English Romantic movement with their 1798 book Lyrical Ballads, a collaborative collection that proclaimed poetry should use everyday, folksy language (that's the "ballad" part) to explore the depths of the soul and the imagination (the "lyrical" part).

  These were very new ideas in the 18th century, whose most prominent writers (like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope) were more interested in satirical, elegant wit than plainspoken sincerity. But Wordsworth's and Coleridge's innovations would change poetry forever. Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," for example, meditated on nature and memory in a way that was completely novel in its time—and has now become a perfect example of what readers expect poetry to do.

  By the time Wordsworth wrote "Surprised by joy," he was (like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner) "a sadder and a wiser man" than he had been in his youth. Or certainly a sadder one, at any rate. This poem responds to the 1812 death of two of his young children, a blow from which he and his beloved wife Mary never recovered.

  "Surprised by joy" first appeared in Wordsworth's 1815 collection Poems. The version examined in this guide (which is the most commonly anthologized version) comes from an 1820 reprint with a couple of changed words. (See the Resources section of this guide to compare the two versions.) Of the works in that collection, this poem in particular became famous and influential. The noted children's writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, for example, used its first words as the title for his spiritual autobiography.

  Historical Context

  "Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind" records a terrible moment in Wordsworth's personal history. He first published this poem in 1815, three years after he and his wife Mary lost two children: first Catherine, who was only three, and then Thomas, only six. (Some years later, they would also lose their daughter Dora, who died at the age of 42, just a few years before her father.)

  Such family tragedies were sadly common in Wordsworth's time and place. The England of the 19th century had horrific child mortality rates. Due in large part to poor sanitation and an incomplete germ theory, around one in three children born in England in 1800 didn't live to see their fifth birthday.

  Little Catherine may have had other health problems, too. Certain details of her appearance and behavior have led modern critics to speculate that she might have suffered from complications due to Down's syndrome.

More “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” Resources

• External Resources

  • Poems (1815) — Read Wordsworth's preface to his 1815 collection Poems, in which "Surprised by joy" first appeared.

  • 1815 vs. 1820 — Take a look at the two versions of the poem that Wordsworth published, one in 1815 and one (very slightly revised) in 1820. Find the words he changed, and ask: why those?

  • The Wordsworth Museum — Visit the website of a museum dedicated to Wordsworth's life and work.

  • Portraits of Wordsworth — Take a look at some portraits of Wordsworth via London's National Portrait Gallery.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth

  • A Complaint

  • A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

  • Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

  • Expostulation and Reply

  • Extract from The Prelude (Boat Stealing)

  • It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

  • I Travelled Among Unknown Men

  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

  • Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

  • Lines Written in Early Spring

  • London, 1802

  • Mutability

  • My Heart Leaps Up

  • Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

  • She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

  • She was a Phantom of Delight

  • Strange fits of passion have I known

  • The Solitary Reaper

  • The Tables Turned

  • The World Is Too Much With Us

  • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower

  • To a Snowdrop

  • We Are Seven