Surprised by Joy

The speaker, immersed in his grief, is stunned to feel joy for a moment. But the poem’s use of this word in particular to describe the speaker’s uplift is significant. Unlike happiness, pleasure, or delight, “joy” symbolizes more than casual elation. 

In Protestant Christianity (Wordsworth’s religion) joy is an expression of the divine. In Platonic idealism (which Wordsworth studied), joy represents the sublime. In both cases, joy confirms that the material world has a spiritual dimension. Although the speaker feel guilt-ridden to experience this positive moment, the joy he feels connects also to hope that defies the poem’s insistence on death’s absolute nature. 

While the speaker claims that “neither present time, nor years unborn / Could to my sight that heavenly face restore” (Lines 13-14), the word “heavenly” echoes the religious undercurrents of “joy” to hint at consolations to come in the afterlife. The speaker, still too deeply immersed in sorrow, sees joy as trivial and wrestles with his experience of it. However, this joy assures the speaker that the grave is not the final word.

Wordsworth was a lifelong Christian and an ardent Neo-Platonist who saw the organic universe as a kinetic field of endless energy. In contrast, the unrelenting sorrow in “Surprised by Joy” represents Wordsworth’s darkest moments of doubt about the post-material promises of his religion.