On the Power and Perils of Emotional Poetry

William Wordsworth, C. S. Lewis, and what is at stake when writing about intense feelings

Photo by Chris Gallagher on Unsplash

In the early morning hours of June 5, 1812, a three-year-old girl suffered from a devastating, and ultimately fatal, series of convulsions. Both of her parents were away and they did not learn of their daughter’s death until a week later when she had already been buried.¹

Young Catherine Wordsworth, the daughter of famed poet William Wordsworth (1843-1850) and his wife Mary, was buried in Grasmere. Six months later she would be joined by her six-year-old brother Thomas who succumbed to the measles later that winter.²

After several years William Wordsworth would write one poem about Catherine entitled Surprised by Joy.

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.

Inspired by the Petrarchan sonnet, the poem is written in fourteen iambic pentameter lines and bears an ABBAACCADEDEDE rhyme scheme. The tight construction is able to hold the overwhelming sorrow of the speaker. He begins in a moment of joy and instinctually turns to share his wonder with his child only to remember that she has passed away.

The enjambments make the grief flow relentlessly but are most notable in the transition between the last line of the octave and the first line of the sestet. These lines—“to be blind/ To my most grievous loss!” and “That thought’s return/ Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore”—are the emotional climax of the poem, winding down into the vaguest hint of God with the word heavenly.

In his "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth wrote,

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Wordsworth could only write about his profound state after a period of contemplation during which he took to crafting something that captured his pain—depicting a brief, everyday moment. As romantic and simple as it seemed, what he did was not pure emotion. Poetry is an art, and the word art comes from the Latin ars which also means skill, and that skill is showed in the care with which he chose his words.

Such similar circumstances and feelings can lead others, less proficient than Wordsworth, to wield their own pens. In her Hudson Review article, “A tomb for thee, my babe!” Bad Poems for the Death of Children, Perri Klass introduces us to the work of Julia Ann Moore (1847–1920), the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” who may very well be one of the worst poets in the history of poetry.

You may be thinking, Wow! She can’t be *that* bad.

If so, you may want to consider this review of Moore’s work from the Rochester Democrat:

“Shakespeare, could he read it, would be glad that he was dead…”

But we should just let her verse speak for itself.

Here is “Hattie House”:

Those little girls will not forget
The day little Hattie died,
For she was with them when she fell in a fit,
While playing by their side.

And “Little Libbie”:

One more little spirit to Heaven has flown,
     To dwell in that mansion above,
Where dear little angels, together roam,
     In God's everlasting love.

The meter is terrible and the rhymes are not quite right. However, from what I have read, Moore was quite earnest. Her pain was no less potent than any other more well-regarded poet. Married at seventeen, she went on to bear ten children, four of whom never saw adulthood. In the nineteenth century child mortality affected nearly every family. This gave rise to what Max Cavitch calls “the profuse, etiolated leaves of antebellum child elegy—at once the most cherished and reviled of subgenres.”³ The scorn for these poems came from the saccharine and clumsy language that was often prevalent in these works.

Would you want a poem about your deceased baby written so poorly that it was openly ridiculed in newspapers?

This is where we need to talk very personally about poetry and why many people hate it. The best poetry is written so well it is easy to read, which gives the false impression that it was effortless to create. And so people try their hand at poetry, and they are not able to tell if it is good or bad. They don’t know what works and what doesn’t and why that is. Much of what people write is simply the effluvia of the soul poured out on the page. The subject of the verse itself may be good and true, but it lacks beauty that is found in the art of its craft. Many amateur writers of verse out there (and I may very well just count myself as one of the poetasters) don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to good poetry. Many of us were never taught when we needed exact rhymes or when we could use slant rhymes. We were never taught to hear the rhythms of the language; therefore, we never understood the incantatory effects of meter.

This is not a matter of pleasing arbitrary tastemakers. Beautiful poetry will actually have certain elements that will make it memorable and compelling.

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In addition to being the title of Wordsworth’s famous sonnet, you may recognize Surprised by Joy as the name of C. S. Lewis’s 1955 autobiography of his earliest years until 1931.

He would not know this at the time of his book’s publication, but the woman who had a strong hand in editing this book, Joy Gresham, would become his unexpected wife in two years. Despite the coincidence, Surprised by Joy has absolutely nothing to do with her but Lewis’s friends would later quip that he truly was “surprised by Joy.”

Their love story was captured in a number of places, but most notably in the 1993 film Shadowlands. It is quite fascinating to find out how these two personalities ultimately fell in love. It took Joy being diagnosed with terminal metastasized breast cancer in 1957 for Lewis to admit to himself how much he loved her. Joy passed away in 1960 and a year later Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, one of the most eloquent books written about mourning.

C. S. Lewis composed this epitaph for his wife’s grave:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

Perhaps I am wrong about strong emotions and poetry. Maybe everyone has a right to write whatever they want about the ones they love. But as for me, I believe that one should write as much poetry as they can in a way that it is so beautiful that it is memorable.

In Jewish tradition it is thought that you die twice. First, when you stop breathing and your body ceases to function. And then a second time, when the name of the dead person is uttered, read or thought of for the last time.

Poetry is a technology that aids memory and, thus in this Jewish sense, extends that second life. Catherine Wordsworth and Joy Davidman live on in the art of men who loved them.

This is the power of poetry—and why we need to write it so beautifully that it is remembered.

We can’t afford for it to be so bad it is forgettable.

1. E. Michael Thron, The Significance of Catherine Wordsworth's Death to Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Vol. 28, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1988), pp. 559-567 (9 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/450660

2. Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (2021) pp. 1-4

3. Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis, 2007), p. 149.