Death posed a particularly nagging challenge to the first generation of British Romantics. In celebrating the energy of nature, they found death a stubborn exception or a tragic anomaly to nature’s kinetic power. After all, nature seemingly provides inspiration, offering radiant assurances of generous renewal. However, death resists such reassurances; it is permanent and fixed, and has no hopeful opposite—like winter without the promise of spring or midnight without the approach of dawn. As the speaker observes in this sonnet’s melancholy close, no amount of time will return to sight “that heavenly face” (Line 14). 

The speaker’s overwhelming melancholy is central to the sonnet. Although many of Wordsworth other poems extol a natural world bursting with energy, here the speaker is trapped in the tragic death.

The opening two lines present the dilemma. The speaker, reeling from the loss of those he loved, is momentarily “surprised by joy.” Despite his grief, he cannot help but respond to this respite from his sadness. The poem never specifies what triggers the experience—the cause is immaterial, since the feeling is universal. The speaker thus stands in for all mourners who cannot entirely suppress all positive emotions. No matter how much their thoughts are with those who have gone, those left grieving are not dead. 

When the speaker is unexpectedly uplifted—he calls the sensation a “transport” (Line 2)—he is “impatient as the wind” (Line 1) to connect his loved ones to this surge of good. However, the instant realization that he cannot share the moment is crushing; the speaker now feels not only grief for the dead, but also guilt about feeling happy. He chides himself for momentarily losing sight of his mourning and returns his focus to death, symbolized by the “silent Tomb” (Line 3). Self-abnegating, the speaker wants to deny himself the pleasure of being alive. Instead, he meditates on what his loved one is experiencing: He reminds himself that “no vicissitude” (Line 4) can alter the stillness of the grave. 

Rather than interacting with the living world, the speaker addresses the loved ones that are beyond it: “How could I forget thee?” (Line 6), he scolds himself. He is shocked that he could have spent any amount of time on the material existence around him, ceasing to dwell on the magnitude of his “most grievous loss” for the “least division of an hour” (Line 9). The reader is forced to consider how fruitful the speaker’s commitment is—does avoiding living elevate the love he feels?

The speaker reiterates the permanence of his grief, which is now doubled. The “pang” of sorrow (Line 10) today—sorrow at realizing that he cannot always keep his mind as narrowly focused on the dead as he would like—is almost as great as the pang when he first heard the news of the deaths of his “heart’s best treasure” (Line 12). The speaker has trapped himself in private loss, but the desire to never leave the graveside is universal. 

For his poem, Wordsworth uses the Petrarchan sonnet—a traditional form that generally consists of eight lines positing a dilemma and then a pithy or unexpected resolution in the closing six lines. However, Wordsworth’s deconstructed approach to the sonnet offers no such relief at the end. Instead, in the last two lines the speaker accepts that he will never again see the face of those he has lost—that his grief is absolute and cannot be undone by any pleasure or happiness the material world has to offer.

Readers can interpret this closing in several ways. Perhaps we are meant to distance ourselves from the speaker, who serves as a cautionary tale of lost perspective—the Romantics urged their readers to value above all the luminous splendor of the organic world. However, the speaker’s pain is deeply relatable; perhaps distancing ourselves from his expression of grief is also a form of lost perspective. If the poem exhorts us not to blame ourselves for unexpected joy, it also values holding on to the memories of our darkest losses.